


Things You Said...

by momebie (katilara)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-24 22:02:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 34,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3785866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a round up of all my responses to the 'Things You Said...' prompt meme over on Tumblr for archiving/finding later purposes. </p><p>These aren't connected, for the most part. I just wanted to keep them together. Each chapter title will be the prompt and pairing. Each chapter notes field will include the initial requester and a link to its original post. The most obscure pairings are in the first several chapters, followed by friendships and then the Blue/Gansey and Adam/Ronan. I've done some light editing, just because I could really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Things you said with too many miles between us (Orla/Helen Gansey)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113483803264/15-orla-helen), written for [polytropia](http://polytropia.tumblr.com/).

Orla is sitting in the Phone/Sewing/Cat room, perched on an armless kitchen chair with her feet propped up on the small table where the phone sits. She’s meticulously painting thin, straight black stripes over a delicate pink manicure she’s just given herself. Black and pink always make her think of classy things, like French bakeries and the Victoria’s Secret catalogue and Helen Gansey, whose call she is currently waiting on.

It’s been a couple of months since they’d met in Henrietta’s better bar, and once she’d lured Helen away from that stuck up brother of hers and the rest of Blue’s boys, she had made good on the better time she’d offered her and then slipped her number into Helen’s back pocket as she turned to go. Helen doesn’t call regularly or anything and Orla doesn’t expect her to. What Orla expects is that Helen has a very high profile and fulfilling life in DC that is sometimes punctured by the memory of Orla’s tongue. That’s what Orla aspires to be in general. A good memory with the power to shake people. It’s afforded her much more power than being a psychic ever has.

So no, Helen doesn’t call regularly, but Orla has a good feeling about tonight. It pays off about 9:30. Orla lets the phone ring a few times, nonchalant. When she finally picks it up she says, “I knew I’d hear from you tonight.” Her voice is slow and careful, leaning on the valley accent that’s part of her brand.

“Guess it’s impossible to surprise someone like you,” Helen says.

“It’s very difficult,” Orla agrees. She doesn’t elaborate on the fact that being psychic has nothing to do with a person’s inability to surprise her. When you’re open to anything very little has the ability to surprise you.

“How’s your town?”

“Same as it ever was. When are you gonna come take me away from all of this?” It’s a question she asks all of the time, but not one she particularly wants an answer to.

Helen laughs. “Oh, hon, you don’t need me to rescue you. If anything it’s the rest of Henrietta that needs rescuing.”

“Accurate,” Orla says. 

She finishes her final stripe and puts the cap back on the bottle of polish. The cat comes and tries to sniff at her toes, so she picks him up and folds him into her lap. She brushes his fur and thinks about how soft Helen Gansey’s hair is. The cat purrs contentedly.

“What color have you gone with this evening?” Helen asks.

“Pink and black.”

“Classy, like macarons.”

“That’s what I thought,” Orla says, even though she finds macarons to be largely ridiculous. What’s the point of a cookie that’s mostly air and doesn’t taste like anything? Though, from what she knows about rich people, maybe they’re just baking to a theme.

“You want to hear about my latest date? It was with the son of one of my mother’s garden party friends and it was  _dreadful_.”

There are few things Orla enjoys listening to more than tales of failed social functions. Especially when Helen’s laugh is so light and infectious. She has a way of completely lambasting someone while sounding sympathetic about it. It’s a skill Orla is trying to develop.

“Shoot,” she says.

Helen launches into the story, but Orla finds her heart is only half in listening to it. She continues to pet the cat and make light noises of shock and agreement, but mainly she’s thinking about how Helen doesn’t think she needs saving. And she’s right. Orla is perfectly capable of taking what she wants from the world, but she doesn’t know how to decide what that is exactly, as opposed to Helen who seems to never be indecisive about anything.

Still, Orla has yet to meet a girl in a dusty southern town who doesn’t want someone to want to rescue her, regardless of whether or not she needs it.


	2. Things you said through your teeth (Declan Lynch/Helen Gansey)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112847199724/am-i-too-late-2-helen-declan), written for [polytropia](http://polytropia.tumblr.com/).

They’ve only been dating for a few months, and it’s not even what Declan really considers dating. He’s mainly been her ornament at some of Mrs. Gansey’s political fundraisers and they’ve had several bouts of late night Indian food like the order they’re currently waiting on, but for the most part Helen keeps to her own life and he keeps to his. He doesn’t mind it, it’s tidy, but it hasn’t earned her a spot in the Lynch family pew. **  
**

“Come on,” she says. “We can take the copter. It’ll save you from spending six hours on the road.”

“I don’t mind the drive,” he says, because he doesn’t.

He finds a clarity behind the wheel of a car that he finds few other places and honestly he needs the time to steel himself to handle Ronan. Ronan, who is their father’s son through and through, and Declan swears it didn’t used to be this hard. Whenever he looks back on it he can’t tell which of them clapped shut first, whether it was his anger at their father for the burden he’d left him that turned him sour on Ronan or Ronan picking up on that anger that turned him sour on Declan. Not that it matters now, too much blood has been spilled to go back.

“Then I can not mind it, too,” she says. Helen places her hand on top of his and leans in, studying him. Declan is so incredibly weak for Helen Gansey’s eyes. The quizzical way her brow pops, how when she looks at the world it’s hardly ever a mere gaze and usually an inquisition.

“You’re not even religious,” he grits out, and he can hear his father’s frustration in the way that he does it, which makes him even more angry at himself. Declan pulls his hand away and she furrows her eyebrows. She’s used to getting what she wants. She’s used to him giving her what she wants, which is his own fault, really.

He doesn’t know how to explain to her that he’s done this before without insulting her. Granted, the last time he brought a girlfriend to church it had been to purposefully set Ronan off and he likes to think that this time it’s different. He likes to think that he and Helen might actually stand a chance, but Ronan won’t see it that way. He’ll only see the old slights repackaged. It’s hard for Declan to admit to himself that that is partially his fault, but he likes to think he’s growing. He likes to think a lot of things, but merely thinking never built a thing worth keeping.

Dreaming maybe, but not thinking. And that’s a whole other point of contention.

“Look, it’s just, my family is complicated, and it’s delicate, and I  _know_  Ronan likes you,” he says, cutting off the protest he already knows is coming, “but this isn’t pizza with our little brothers. This is ritual. This is heavy and important and I honestly don’t know how else to say it to make you understand.”

“We can have pizza with our little brothers after,” she says. “After you go to church I go to do some snooping for my mom?”

And god damn it. One day someone is going to be able to say no to Helen Gansey, but it is obviously not going to be Declan Lynch and it is not going to be tonight. “Fine,” he says. “But we’re driving.”

“Perfect!” She pops up off the couch and starts toward the door of his apartment.

“Where are you going?” he asks, more than a little bewildered. Their food still hasn’t arrived and she’d promised him they could start the new season of House of Cards. He’s been looking forward to both of those things all week.

“I left a weekend bag in the car, just in case,” she says. “You don’t mind if I stay the night, right?”

“I-” he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.

He doesn’t mind. He’s not surprised. He’s not angry. He’s just amused, and so glad to know someone who refuses to settle. So pleased, deep down, that a person who doesn’t settle would still choose him, even though he’s just a man with no inherited magic to speak of. Declan pushes himself off the couch and follows after her. He grabs her wrist just as she opens the door and tugs her back.

Helen turns around, ready to protest, but instead he pulls her close and kisses her. She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him back. They’re still caught up in one another in the doorway when the food arrives. The delivery boy’s embarrassment gives way to laughter and Declan, who never thought he’d be happy again after having to leave his home, begins to think that just maybe he’s found another place to truly live.


	3. Things you said through your teeth (Joseph Kavinsky/dream!Prokopenko)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113026246499/kavinsky-dream-proko-2), written for [lisapizza](http://lisapizza.tumblr.com/).

As far as their friends knew, Prokopenko had been sick for the better part of a week. Kavinsky had been collecting his homework from teachers and relaying messages to the rest of the group while insisting that Proko just didn’t want to see anyone. For the most part this went unquestioned. There had been a close call with Skov insisting on going to Prokopenko’s dorm room to check up on him, but Kavinsky managed to talk him down when no one answered the door, claiming that the kid needed his rest in the most beatific manner he could muster. Which for Joseph Kavinsky was not really very angelic at all. It didn’t need to be to be effective. **  
**

At the same time Kavinsky was spending every free moment he had taking pills and tripping into the dream world, desperately trying to find a Prokopenko to bring back. This was mostly because he didn’t want to have to explain the hard drugs and the dead friend in his backyard to any sort of authorities—he could hear his father in his head too, disappointed as always—but also because he liked the way their group was and he wasn’t prepared for that sort of absence to gut it. It was only in his less guarded, more worn moments that he would admit to himself that, well, he would really miss that asshole.

So he did what he knew how to do. Or he tried to, anyway. People were complex. It was one thing to gank a hundred gleaming white cars that were going to be taken at face value and another thing entirely to try to capture the physical and emotional essence of a person that would stand up to the expectations of the people who knew him. It almost broke Kavinsky. Almost.

The night he finally achieved it he had all but given up. Kavinsky was exhausted and desperate and his eyes were rimmed red with frustrated tears as he stood over yet another crumpled, failed version of Prokopenko in the dream glade. His knuckles were cracked and smeared with blood from the beating he’d given the wax mannequin that had dared to present itself as his friend. He was breathing heavily, gulping for the air, and his heart was running with the bulls.

The forest had whipped itself into a frenzy while the fight was happening, but now that it didn’t appear Kavinsky was actually going to take anything the trees were dying down. The only sound was the light creaking of branches as if they were caught in a spring breeze and the slow footsteps coming up behind him through the brush. A hand dropped onto Kavinsky’s shoulder and he wheeled around, preparing for a second fight, when there he was. Not in the blood stained wife beater Kavinsky had buried him in, but in clean jeans and a t-shirt bearing a large photograph of a Bulgarian rapper that he knew Prokopenko had never heard of. Kavinsky didn’t even care right now that his dreams had a terrible sense of humor.

This Prokopenko looked perfect. From the gelled hair that was getting just a little too long to the hazy grey eyes to the smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and the way he stood slightly pigeon toed. Kavinsky had a moment where he remembered, almost simultaneously, all of the separate moments he’d taken these details from. The first time they took the dream E together in the men’s restroom in Nino’s. The warm summer night Prokopenko and Swan had raced the Golfs and Prokopenko had finally won. That bright autumn morning Kavinsky had bullied Prokopenko into that first kiss, thrilling with the power he had over this boy as well as the heat of him.

“What are you doing, K?” Prokopenko asked.

“I’m looking for you.” The beating of his heart slowed to a canter.

“Are we late for the races?” Prokopenko toed at the dirt between them with his gleaming white tennis shoe. “God, I’m sorry, K. Time got away from me.”

Kavinsky laughed then, because he didn’t know any other way to react. It sounded sharp to his ears, like a broken beer bottle being used as a weak defense. He grabbed Prokopenko roughly by the shoulders and shook him. “You should be fucking sorry, you bastard.”

Prokopenko ran his hand through his hair the way he always did when he was anxious. “I’ll try not to do it again.”

“You’d better fucking not,” Kavinsky said. He let his hands slide down to Prokopenko’s wrists and looped his fingers around them delicately, reveling in the pulse he found there. The normal, human, warm pulse. And then, because he didn’t know how else to do it, he wrapped his arms tight around Prokopenko and willed himself to wake up.

When Kavinsky opened his eyes he was on his side in his bed, arms and legs wrapped around Prokopenko like he’d been trying to climb him, face pressed into the corner of his neck. He inhaled, checking for the scent of him and yes, this brand new being smelled of Axe deodorant and hair paste and sweat and motor oil just the way he would have if he’d been moving through the world for the seventeen years leading up to this point.

Prokopenko groaned and shoved weakly at Kavinsky’s thigh. “Get off of me,” he grumbled. “Christ, what did we take last night?”

“God only knows,” Kavinsky said, face still pressed into Prokopenko’s neck. He never wanted to let go. If that first forced kiss had made him feel powerful then this was something else entirely. He was a god. He could do whatever he wanted and have whatever he wanted. Not that he hadn’t suspected before, but now he had proof. It was terrifying. He’d never been so high in his life.

“You really need to start vetting that shit.”

“What do you think I have you for?”

“Fuck you,” Prokopenko said, shoving at him again, teeth clenching with the effort. “Getoffme, it’s hot.”

“Mmf.” Kavinsky responded, pressing in closer. He lightly grazed the cap of Prokopenko’s shirt covered shoulder with his teeth. Just another test. “I’ll get off alright.”

“I hate you,” Prokopenko said.

It came out more gently than Kavinsky was used to and he finally pulled away, tilting his head up to study Prokopenko’s face. Prokopenko still looked perfect, still felt perfect, but something was different. “Do you?”

“Yeah, who doesn’t.” He shoved him again and Kavinsky let go, allowing himself to be pushed unceremoniously onto his own floor. “This isn’t mine,” Prokopenko said, looking down at the shirt.

“Yeah uh, you got blood on your other one. That’s mine,” Kavinsky lied.

Prokopenko shrugged.

“You don’t remember?”

“The last thing I remember is my mind being blown by that coke. Everything sort of slowed down for a bit and then I guess I passed out.”

“Yeah,” Kavinsky said delicately, “you did.”

“Shit. You didn’t draw any dicks on my face did you?” Prokopenko got up and headed for the bedroom door.

“Stop!” Kavinsky said, and Prokopenko did. And shit, if this was not what he wanted. He approached Prokopenko cautiously and grabbed his chin. “There are no dicks on your face.”

“I swear to God, if I find more pictures of you teabagging me on the internet-”

Kavinsky kissed him, hard. He grabbed the sides of his head and held him in place and pressed his tongue between Prokopenko’s teeth. Prokopenko let him. He didn’t fight back. He didn’t press into Kavinsky in return. He didn’t do anything. Kavinsky pulled away.

“How could I have left the fight out of you,” Kavinsky breathed. “That was my favorite part.”

Prokopenko tilted his head. “Are you still high?” he asked.

“No,” Kavinsky said miserably, as all of the adrenaline drained out of him. He let go of the doll he’d hoped would be Prokopenko and turned his mind to whether or not he should try again.


	4. Things you said I wasn’t meant to hear (Joseph Kavinsky/Adam Parrish)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112523425824/kavinsky-adam-20-done-for-real-now), written for [lisapizza](http://lisapizza.tumblr.com/).

The last place Adam wants to be as the second third period bell rings is huddled in the corner of the boy’s gym locker room. Third period is Trig, and he needs to go to Trig. It doesn’t come as easily to him as he would like it to and he can’t let that last B stand if he’s going to get any sort of scholarship. But five minutes before the end of second period something started humming in his deaf ear and wouldn’t stop. He needed to find silence so he could focus on it. Or a close proximity of silence.

Now he’s pressed himself into the far, dark corner between a bank of lockers with his eyes closed and is whispering to Cabeswater. “I can’t now. Whatever you want I’ll try after school. Please.  _Please_.”

Finally, thankfully, the humming ends, but just as he’s about to pick up his bag and go the door slams open and closed again and there’s a clamor of footsteps, still in the dark.

“So what about Lynch?” A familiar voice says and Adam freezes up entirely.

He can’t move if he tries now, because Joseph Kavinsky is on the other side of the lockers flicking a lighter with steady clicks and talking about Ronan. Adam’s a little afraid of what they’ll do if they find him here. He’s also a little afraid of leaving before he knows what they have to say.

“I don’t know, I don’t think he likes you,” says another voice, light and amused. Swan, he thinks.

Adam’s spent the better part of his time at Aglionby trying to stay away from Kavinsky and his gang while also trying to figure out what it is about them that seems to catch Ronan’s attention. Sure, they’re proud and loud and flashy and don’t seem concerned with what the world wants for them, but as far as Adam can tell Ronan is already all of those things. It isn’t something he needs to covet. It is, in fact, something Adam quietly covets about Ronan.

Maybe it is all about the cars. Or maybe it isn’t. The smell of smoke curls up into Adam’s nose and he swallows hard. Of course, what else would anyone be doing in a disused locker room in the middle of the day?

Kavinsky laughs without mirth and it makes all of the hair on Adam’s neck stand up. “Yeah, he doesn’t like anyone though, so it’s a challenge.”

“Just  _Dick_ ,” another voice says. Prokopenko? “And the poor one.”

“Parrish,” Swan replies. A sudden annoyance flares in Adam. He’d rather be ‘the poor one’ to them. They don’t deserve his name in their mouths.  

“And that brother of his. The nice one, not the mean one,” Prokopenko says.

“A mean Lynch brother,” Kavinsky says, slowly as if it’s a puzzle to be turned over, testing the words for veracity.

“Why are you so hung up on him anyway?” Prokopenko again.  

There’s a moment of silence while, Adam assumes, they’re busy smoking, before Swan speaks up. “K always wants what he can’t have.”

“He and I share a talent,” Kavinsky exhales.

“I don’t know, K,” Swan says. “We’ve already established that he’s not nearly as interested in you as you are.”

“Super interested in Parrish though, right?” Kavinsky asks. “That’s not just me?”

“Nah man, it’s not exactly subtle,” Prokopenko says.

“I don’t think Parrish has noticed.” The way Swan says it is lazy, disinterested. The way Adam hears it is as if Swan has stood up on the bench and shouted it to the whole school.

His chest tightens. It might just be the smoke settling into his lungs, but it might also be the weight of all the things he’s catalogued about Ronan’s interest over the last couple of months clicking together. Something has shifted between them since his sacrifice to Cabeswater, but Adam has been chalking that up to the magic, because he feels set apart from all of them now. Everything is different, which is what sacrifice means. Cutting with the past and moving on.  

“I think there might be something Ronan Lynch is actually afraid of,” Kavinsky says, and it comes out more delicately than Adam has ever thought possible from that cursed knife of a mouth. There’s a moment of thick, understanding silence as the four of them mull it over. Kavinsky, Swan, and Prokopenko from the outside of it and Adam from the inside.

Prokopenko breaks it off. “Not everyone wears their gay like a flack suit, K.”

 _Oh_ , Adam thinks, realizing there’s a lot he actually hasn’t noticed. The smoke is thickening and starting to cling to the back of his throat. He can feel a cough coming on and he tries to suppress it, but to no avail. It comes tripping out of him and then the only thing he can think is,  _fuck_.

Swan’s around the bank of lockers in seconds, Kavinsky and Prokopenko behind him.

“Speak of the devil,” Kavinsky says, folding his elbow onto Swan’s shoulder and leaning forward as he passes the blunt off to Prokopenko. With the wisps of smoke swirling around his face Kavinsky looks more like the devil at that moment than Adam is sure he ever has.

Adam wants to excuse himself quickly, to collect his things and blow by them with a biting remark. He can’t bring himself to move. He just stares at them, limply holding the strap of his messenger bag in his hand, caught between action and inaction. He thinks he spends too much of his life like that.

“I don’t care,” Kavinsky says, “you can tell him.”

“It’s not like he doesn’t know.” Swan’s smile is a dare.

“Take another message to him for me, yeah?” Kavinsky steps around Swan, letting his arm fall heavily to his side before bringing it back up and pressing his palm flat against the locker next to Adam’s head.

There’s not enough time for Adam to think about what’s happening before it’s over. Kavinsky studies him for a second from a few centimeters away and then he’s pressing a kiss to Adam’s cheek, the corners of their mouths brushing slightly. Kavinsky lets his lips slide and trail the kiss almost to Adam’s ear. He whispers something about luck or maybe fucking, but it’s Adam’s bad ear and he can barely make it out. Then Kavinsky pulls back and cuffs Adam as he brings his hand away.

“You might be a worthy opponent yet, Parrish,” he says. He turns to go and Swan and Prokopenko follow. They pause at the door, Kavinsky’s hand on the knob, and he looks back. “Just remember, those with the least to lose fight dirtiest.” Then they’re gone.

Adam had been looking for silence, but he doesn’t want it now. Doesn’t want to think about the things he has to lose and the things Ronan might be afraid of. And he certainly doesn’t want to ever think about Joseph Kavinsky’s mouth again. He considers the pros and cons of taking a shower in bleach as he slinks off to class.


	5. Things you said at the kitchen table (Joseph Kavinsky/Adam Parrish)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/114238727889/god-you-scrub-my-soul-like-a-carrot-with-your-k), written for [thefavouriteanon](http://thefavouriteanon.tumblr.com/). (Abuse trigger warning.)

Adam Parrish is standing in Kavinsky’s kitchen, pale and rumpled and nervous, and Kavinsky still almost can’t believe his luck. He’s sure the teacher who paired them up on this stupid Physics project doesn’t know what he’s done, how he’s delivered a sheep right to the wolf’s doorstep. Dropped off by Lynch no less, brought to him cradled in the teeth of another wolf. And Kavinsky has dreams, brutal and beautiful and maddening, but none of Kavinsky’s dreams have quite matched the utter possibility he feels thrumming beneath his skin as he stands there in the doorway trying to decide how to strike.

Almost none of them. Just Prokopenko, he figures.

Adam pulls several books from his bag and then reaches out to touch the simple machines Kavinsky has left on the table in preparation. He taps one end of the lever and it wavers over its fulcrum but doesn’t fall.

“It’s perfectly balanced,” Kavinsky says, swooping in behind him and dropping his laptop off on the table before swinging around to the fridge. He opens the door and pulls out a beer, turning to hold it out to Adam. “Want one?”

Adam looks at him, eyes full of disdain, and a small thrill runs down Kavinsky’s neck. Adam ignores the beer. “How did you balance it?”

“With fucking science,” Kavinsky says, slamming the door to the fridge and popping the cap off the bottle.

He actually doesn’t have any idea. He’d dreamed them, light and minimally flexible, made of a carbon fiber so black it seemed to pull light into it. He’s very proud of the lever in particular. No matter what you stand on it it won’t unbalance. He’s hoping it will help him with a test of his own in entropy.

Question 1: _How much madness is there constant in a dormant state in a battered boy and what does it take to draw it to the surface?_

Kavinsky knows abuse when he sees it. Knows what to look for, things like long sleeves in the summer and careful movements. He’s had enough of it dealt to him. He’s learned to deal it out to others. He’s a fast learner, and as such there’s something he absolutely despises about the weak, hollow look in Adam Parrish’s eyes. If Ronan isn’t going to take care of his lamb, turn him into a wolf too, then someone needs to. Kavinsky thinks that paradise might be the whole valley full of wolfish boys, licking their lips and eating each other alive.

Adam is unimpressed with his answer. He simply opens one of the books and starts flipping through it. “The questions are relatively simple. If you’ll help with some of this research I’ll go ahead and type it up later and we can be done with it in an hour, tops.”

“I know how to type, Parrish,” Kavinsky says, carefully imitating the way he knows Ronan speaks to him.

Adam’s eyes snap up to meet his. He frowns. “I didn’t say you couldn’t. I just thought this might all be beneath you and some of us actually consider our grades.”

Kavinsky raises an eyebrow. “My grades are pretty good, which I guess I don’t expect you to know, because it doesn’t relate to your owners. Just because I don’t bust my ass and make life difficult for myself doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”

“That has yet to be seen,” Adam murmurs, looking away. His cheeks have gone a pleasing shade of pink.

“Hm,” Kavinsky hums lightly and takes a sip of his beer. “You sure you don’t want one? Might help loosen that stick up your ass.”

Adam doesn’t answer. He angrily flips through the pages of his book for a few minutes and then leans down to his bag and pulls out a digital camera that Kavinsky is sure isn’t his. “I’ll just,” he says, and collects the camera and the fulcrum and lever and places them both on the counter next to the stove to start working on the visuals for the project.

He comes back for one of the books and Kavinsky gives up on looking like he’s working at all. He rests his elbows on the table and his chin against his balled fists and watches Adam place the book on one end of the lever. The arm moves just enough to prove it isn’t glued, but the book doesn’t lower to the counter.

Adam looks at Kavinsky and then at the lever, eyebrows furrowed. “I thought you said it was balanced perfectly.”

“It is,” Kavinsky says. “It is in fact, impossible to unbalance it.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Adam says.

“Life doesn’t make sense.”

Kavinsky gets up from his chair. He presses in close to Adam to reach past him for the machine, drapes his arm over Adam’s shoulder. Adam flinches away and leans into the counter. Kavinsky sets the little lever in the middle of the kitchen floor. He holds his hand out to Adam and Adam looks at it dubiously. “Well, come on, don’t be an asshole.”

Adam steps up to the other side of the lever and holds his hands with his palms up flat so Kavinsky can use them for balance. Kavinsky doesn’t need the help. He can balance on his invention just fine and had done so just that morning, but Adam freely offering up his warm, dry skin to be touched is just one more positive result on his way to his hypothesis. 

Question 2: _Is bravado more dangerous to a man than fear?_

Kavinsky grasps Adam’s hands in his own and stands on the lever, his socked feet only ten inches apart and balanced on the thin carbon fiber limbs of the thing. The corners of it bite into his skin through the cotton in a pleasant way. He makes a show of leaning one way and then the other, dipping his knees as if trying to walk a seesaw. Just as before, the lever wobbles gently, but doesn’t lower him to the ground.

“This is fucking nuts,” Adam says. “Honestly, we could probably get a higher grade for subverting the project than doing it if you can explain what you did.”

“Sorry,” Kavinsky says. “My secrets go with me to the grave.”

Adam looks at him in a way that makes it very clear he’d like to help usher him there. Kavinsky laughs, because he can’t help himself. Adam tries to pull his hands away, but Kavinsky clasps them roughly and he’s pulled with them, falling forward and crashing into Adam.

They collide so hard that Adam stumbles clear back into the counter and Kavinsky is pressed against him, hip to hip. Adam finally pulls his hands away and reaches back to hold onto the counter’s edge so hard that his knuckles turn white, all the while looking at Kavinsky with a steadily growing contempt that fills him with something like heady glee. He does so love winning, especially when the other person doesn’t realize it’s a game.

Then something about Adam changes. It’s hard to tell when it happens, even as closely as Kavinsky is watching him. He squares his shoulders and puffs his chest out. He tilts his chin up to meet Kavinsky’s gaze head on and Kavinsky licks his lips, hungering for that newly unleashed pride.

“Get off of me,” Adam says slowly. His eyes are narrowed. His voice is low and rough.

There it is, the anger that Kavinsky wanted to draw. Not the common disapproval that Adam usually reserves for him and for many parts of Aglionby. Not the disdain that he wears so easily to cover his fear. Not even the contempt from seconds ago. This is an Adam Parrish who might spark, who can prove he’s capable of defending himself. Kavinsky leans forward and applies his lips and his hands and the gasoline.

He digs his fingers into Adam’s waist to hold him in place. Adam tries to pull his head back and escape, but he forgets where he’s standing and the back of his skull connects with the cupboard with a sharp thud. Kavinsky hits him just as hard and their teeth and noses knock together. Adam is rigid beneath his soft, untested skin and Kavinsky has an urge to snap him in half. He stops himself, doesn’t go as far as he would, knowing that he’s already trespassing on Ronan’s territory and that there will be hell to pay. Delicious, glorious hell.

There’s a moment where he thinks Adam might kiss him back, where Adam’s lips smooth out beneath his own and his body loosens. It’s only a moment, and then it’s swiftly followed by Adam bringing his hands up to Kavinsky’s shoulders and shoving him hard enough to push him backwards. Kavinsky is still clinging to Adam, so he gets pulled along. Then his fist connects with Kavinsky’s left cheek and everything explodes in a burst of red light.

Kavinsky lets Adam go and stumbles backward, tripping over the lever and falling heavily into one of the kitchen chairs. The light dims and the world slides back into place. His cheek is throbbing, but Adam didn’t hit him hard enough to do much damage. Adam himself is standing across the kitchen, the skin of his cheeks and neck are tinged red with anger and his eyes are startlingly bright. He’s panting and looking at his balled fist as if it’s a gun, almost the way he usually looks at Kavinsky himself. There is terror in possibility, Kavinsky knows, and now Adam does too.

“You fucking bastard,” Adam says, voice shaking just slightly, just like the lever, never bottoming out.

Kavinsky knows that tremor. He knows that look. He knows what it feels like when the anger burns in your gut and you realize that you could be just like your father if you wanted to be. It would be so easy to be them, but Adam and Kavinsky are not them. They’re something else entirely, more dangerous by far. Finally, Kavinsky thinks, Adam might be on his way to realizing that. Finally he might be interesting.

“Game point to entropy,” Kavinsky says.


	6. Things you said when we were the happiest we ever were (Ronan Lynch/Joseph Kavinsky)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112585358074/kavinsky-ronan-19), written for [lisapizza](http://lisapizza.tumblr.com/).

“I would give anything for one of those bastards to break away and light his whole fucking world up,” Kavinsky says. He’s perched on the trunk of the Mitsubishi, elbows propped up on his knees, smoking a cigarette. “Like when they took the dinosaurs out. One day you’re eating leaves and running from the fucking t-rex, the next day, KABOOM.” He waves his hands over his head for effect.

“Hn,” Ronan grunts.

The BMW is parked next to Kavinsky on the ridge and Ronan’s leaning against the side of it with his hands in his pockets. It had been warm in town, but up here at the sudden end of where a street race had become an all out chase, where they can see the anemic glow of Henrietta beneath them, the wind is sharper. It slides through the openings of his t-shirt and he suppresses a shiver.

Kavinsky, whose angular white shoulders are jutting out like waning moons from the curved straps of his black tank top, doesn’t appear to be affected. He just sits looking up at the sky as the meteors streak across it, leaving temporary trails of gold across the black as if they’re clawing at the atmosphere, a massive monster trying to get in and eat them whole.

Ronan doesn’t put as much stock in fire as Kavinsky. He thinks that the clarity left behind by it isn’t worth the incandescent rage that has to take you whole for that to happen. Begrudgingly though, at this moment, he can see where Kavinsky is coming from. It’s hard not to look into the black above and see the burning hearts you want to find there. He thinks about Adam’s eyes when he’s angry and the way Gansey’s breath quickens like a nervous bellows when he’s full of anxious energy. Perhaps everyone has fire within them. Perhaps if Kavinsky got his wish people would survive because they’d already had a lifetime of practice with the lick of flames inside of them.

Perhaps.

“This is god-damn-fucking romantic,” Kavinsky says when Ronan doesn’t answer. “You and me under the stars. Should have packed some champagne and cocaine.”

Ronan cocks an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware agreeing to a race constituted a date.”

“You should always read the fine print.” Kavinsky flicks the butt of the cigarette away and Ronan watches it trail like its brothers above. “Don’t worry, I don’t bring flowers, I just fucking take them.”

“Why don’t you just light the forest on fire, if that’s what you want?”

“You’re a genius, Lynch,” Kavinsky drawls. “I don’t know why I didn’t think about that. Except that it’s fucking hard to light a tree on fire with a pocket lighter. All that wood’s a lot wetter than you’d think. But I guess you don’t need me to tell you how wet wood can be.” He laughs then, dirty and prurient. “Besides, a fire with a known origin is too predictable. I’m a thief, not an architect. I don’t get off on the order of nature and shit.”

Ronan feels uncomfortable thinking about anything that might get Joseph Kavinsky off. It’s a minor discomfort in the scheme of things, though. His heart is still racing from the chase and his botched drift that almost sent he and Kavinsky careening down the side of the mountain. They could have died.

 _We could have died_ , he thinks, _and we didn’t_. The words sit like kindling in his gut and he feels like he’s being smoked out. It’s hard not to feel like you own the world when you’re standing above it and staring down at the sleepy homes of thousands of people who might never know what  _we could have died_  feels like. What is the point of life if you don’t know first hand just how easily it is to be otherwise?

 _No point_ , he thinks.  _No happiness_.  _This is happiness, here above it all_. Even having achieved his happiness with a person he roundly despises is better than having stayed home nursing his painful crush and his fear of sleep.

The Mitsubishi lets out a sigh of a creak as Kavinsky hops off of it. He closes the distance between them and grabs Ronan roughly by the waist with both hands, a few of his fingers nudging up under Ronan’s t-shirt. The touch burns like everything else around him is burning and Ronan imagines that tomorrow he’ll have gold scratch marks where Kavinsky is grasping at him. A monster, trying to claw his way in and devour.

Ronan doesn’t say no. He knows there’s no point. Kavinsky will take what he wants anyway and Ronan has been craving touches like this. Different hands, surely, but he longs to be hungered for and Kavinsky is always hungry. Besides, he can overpower him if he needs to, if Kavinsky tries to take more than Ronan has carelessly left on the side of the road for the taking. Kavinsky’s mouth is hot against Ronan’s neck and his fingers are cold against the skin of his back and somewhere in him the smoke from the kindling gives way to flame. He keeps his eyes trained upward, watching the meteors continue to claw at the sky as Kavinsky’s teeth graze his jaw.

He doesn’t put stock in fire like Kavinsky does, but even the supplest trees in a forest will catch if everything else around them goes up first.


	7. Things you said when we were on top of the world (Richard Campbell Gansey III & Adam Parrish)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/115088560324/yeah-blue-and-ronan-were-my-unexpected-brotp-too), written for [lyndiadioyn](http://lyndiadioyn.tumblr.com/).

“This is amazing,” Gansey says. He throws his arms wide to indicate all of the ‘this’ that he means. The late afternoon sun is reflecting off his hair like a halo. “Do you know how lucky we are, that we get to be close to this?”

Adam looks out over the the edge of the ridge and it’s just Virginia, the same as it always is. He can feel the ley line surging with the energy he and Gansey have just re-routed to it. With each pulse the colors of the forest around him throb slightly deeper. It’s like someone is fiddling with the saturation on the world. He thinks that if Gansey could see the forest and the mountains the way he sees them now his head might explode.

“Sure,” he says, not wanting to sound ungrateful.

Gansey’s breath is spilling rapidly from his chest as he comes down from the exertion it had taken to move several them-sized boulders. It’s dancing around his lips in small clouds against the cold mountain air. The tips of his sweat soaked hair are sticking to his forehead and ears and his eyes are open wide, showing a Gansey-appropriate amount of awe over the majesty of nature.

Adam wonders often if it was death that had made Gansey so hungry for life or if he would always have grown up to want to know everything. Adam has learned over the last year that it’s almost impossible to pinpoint what makes a person who they are, since what makes a person anything is everything they’ve ever known.

He has a sudden urge to reach over and grab Gansey by the arm, to hold onto him until the danger of his second death passes. This knowledge is still only a secret between him and Blue, still only eating away at both of them, keeping them desperate and watchful. What would they be without him? What would Adam be without him? What had allowed Adam the space to become who he is more than Gansey’s hopes and Gansey’s stubborn kindness and Gansey as an inciting incident?  _Everything._

Adam lets the feeling settle into him, but doesn’t do anything with it. He clenches and unclenches his right hand, trying to come to a peace with the heady feeling of the power running through him and the ultimate impotence of it.

“Thank you,” Gansey says. It’s so quiet that Adam almost misses it under the sound of his own pulse echoing in his deaf ear.

“Someone has to do it,” he replies. He stretches and cracks his neck.

Gansey flinches away from the sound. “No,” he says. “Not just for this. Thank you for being you, for letting me drag you into this thing. You could have walked away at any time. You certainly could have not done what you did, what you’re still doing. Thank you for believing in me, I guess.”

Adam thinks back at the time that they’ve known each other, trying to pinpoint when he could have possibly walked away. It would have to have been so early, but even then, even if he’d known all of the hurt that was to come, he doesn’t think he would have. There is something about Gansey, about the way he looks at people and the world, that makes a person want to be whatever it is he’s looking for. Why is Gansey thanking Adam for believing in him when it’s his belief in Adam that had started him down the path toward thinking he could be anything at all?

“We’ve all got to believe in something,” Adam says, deflecting. It’s one thing to be able to understand his emotions finally, but he’s still a ways away from being able to accurately voice them.

Gansey turns to look at him. “You’ve been spending too much time with Ronan.”

Adam shrugs and slips his hands into his pockets.

“Entirely too much time.” Gansey laughs.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Adam says, deflecting again. This time away from discussion of Ronan and what they may or may not have.

“I know,” Gansey says. There’s a haughty certainty behind it that would rankle Adam if he’d said it in response to any other bit of information. This though, them, Gansey has earned them. “That doesn’t mean I don’t realize how special it is. How I’ve done nothing to deserve it, like I’ve done nothing to deserve these mountains. Yet here they are, in all of their breathtaking glory. And here you are, here all of you are, in the same. A million other decisions I could have made would have taken me so far from this. I might have never found a place that felt like home and it would have been right here waiting for me. Or maybe not. The mountains don’t need me. You don’t need me, but I’m glad to have you both regardless.”

“You’re wrong,” Adam says. He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t know how to.

Gansey laughs again and Adam’s chest constricts, worried that he’s wasting all of this on himself, worried about how much laughter Gansey has left in him. “That’s why I keep all of you around,” he says. “Because you’ll let me know when I am.”

He reaches out and touches Adam’s shoulder, squeezing it. It has the affect of grounding Adam against him. The surging in him dims. The world goes back to looking the way it always does. Gansey’s sun halo fades. He looks young and uncertain and Adam knows he would sacrifice himself again and again for him. There’s a twist in his stomach that  _wants_ to. He doesn’t want this friendship to end, to ever stop challenging him to  _become_.

“Just, you know,” Gansey says. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Adam says this time.

Gansey gives him a broad, heroic smile and turns back to the mountains around them absorbing, as always, everything.


	8. Things you said when you thought I was asleep (Ronan Lynch & Richard Campbell Gansey III)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113538749264/dont-know-if-youre-still-accepting-prompts-but), written for an anonymous user.

Ronan was curled over in his bed with his headphones on. The mid-afternoon light slanted brightly in through the windows and he had pulled the sheets up over his head to try and block some of it out. It was too much, all of it. The events at the Fourth of July celebration had pulled the fear from him, but it hadn’t managed to quell the feeling that life itself was enormous and immense and impossible to understand. That these soft sheets and this stifling mid-summer heat and this music that had no words but that spoke plainly to him anyway was too much.

It had been a week since everything happened. A week since Kavinsky had been eaten by his own hatred and Prokopenko had crashed in his slumber. A week since they had woken his mother and found the cave. A week since he had replaced his father’s will with a will of his own. A week since he had reluctantly taken Matthew back to Declan at their dorm room and Gansey and Blue had waited patiently downstairs for the thirty minutes it had taken him to be able to let his brother go. Declan had said nothing. He didn’t have to and Ronan hated him for it.

In that week Ronan had showered twice and been outside once. Gansey and Adam brought him food that he ate. He answered their questions and tried to be himself around them, whatever that meant, because he didn’t want to worry them. He especially didn’t want to worry Gansey, who had been through this worry with him so many times before. He didn’t know how to say  _I don’t want to die I just can’t bear to be for a while_ , so he said nothing and listened to music and waited for this feeling to pass as it always did, eventually.

Ronan was curled over in his bed under his sheets when the battery on his iPod finally died. He pulled off his headphones and rolled onto his back, peering out from beneath the covers and squinting into the light. Chainsaw ruffled her feathers in her cage. He tilted his head up to look at her. She looked back at him steadily in a way no one else had in days.

He opened his mouth to respond to her concern, but that was when he heard Noah say, “Do you think we should wake him?” Ronan closed his mouth, thinking better of making any noise just yet, and waited.

“No,” Gansey said. “He’ll come around when he’s ready.”

“But he hasn’t even been to see his mom again,” Noah said. 

Ronan felt a flare of shame at that. He hadn’t. All he’d wanted since his father had died was to have his mother back and now they’d accomplished that, functionally anyway, and he was ignoring her. There was a small voice that assured him she hadn’t been alone. Adam had been taking Matthew to Cabeswater to see her, and even Declan had been once. 

Adam had said he seemed disgusted and inconvenienced by the whole thing right up until the moment he’d seen her, at which point every hard edge on him melted away. Ronan was not surprised by that, but hearing it made him feel a little smug anyway. 

“Just don’t. It’s okay,” Gansey said. It sounded like he was on the far side of the main room, probably at his desk. “He’s okay.”

There was a faith in Gansey’s voice that Ronan didn’t feel he deserved.

“He’s so loud, though,” Noah said.

“How so?”

“There’s all this noise. It’s hard to explain.”

There were a few moments of quiet before Gansey voiced what Ronan was thinking. “Can you always hear what we’re feeling?” Noah must have nodded, because there was no reply. Gansey said, “How does this compare to when you found him before?”

“Oh, it’s not that loud,” Noah said.

Ronan let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. He wondered if that was how Noah responded to their thoughts sometimes. Maybe he wasn’t actually hearing what they were thinking, but getting a strong impression of it instead.

“Good, that’s good.” The relief in Gansey’s voice hit Ronan right in the gut, and then again harder when he followed it up with, “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

Ronan loved Gansey. Gansey was the sort of brother he should have in Declan. Because of this, Ronan tried to be careful with Gansey and how much he drained Gansey’s resources of worry and doubt and fear. He needed a brother who believed him to be as valuable as he believed his brother to be in return. Gansey was the most precious person Ronan had ever met. He knew intellectually that Gansey trusted him and also loved him, but it was another thing entirely to hear it in his tired, worried voice.

“I don’t think you’ll have to find out,” Noah said.

There was something in the way he said it that opened up a whole new pit in Ronan’s stomach, because it sounded like that might make the reverse true and Ronan didn’t know what he’d do without Gansey either. Needful suddenly, he quietly pushed himself up and held his hand out to Chainsaw. She hopped from her cage onto his bed and then over to perch on his knee. She tolerated him picking her up and holding her to his chest with his hands. He could feel the way her heart beat rapidly in her light body, so much faster than his own. Somehow, this was calming.

Gansey sighed. “That’s good. He’s just. He’s the best person I’ve ever known. I still have to learn so many things from him. Like how to be brave and certain and how to have faith like he does. I don’t know how to do any of those things.”

 _That is a lie_ , Ronan thought, and was surprised by how angry and defensive it sounded in his head.

“That’s not true,” Noah said. “Ronan doesn’t think that’s true either.”

Ronan shut his eyes and mentally cursed up a storm, hoping that Noah would hear it, the jerk. If Ronan was going to talk about his feelings with Gansey he was not going to need a proxy for it. Which meant he probably never would, but it should still be his choice.

“You should tell him,” Noah said. Ronan couldn’t tell which one of them he was talking to.

“Maybe,” Gansey said. Ronan could hear the way he was pressing his thumb into his lip, because of how it always slightly altered the sound of his voice.

“There isn’t time for anymore maybes,” Noah said.

Ronan took that as his cue to stretch and get out of bed.


	9. Things you said when you were scared (Ronan Lynch & Blue Sargent)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112660511239/ronan-blue-18), written for [brilligspoons](http://brilligspoons.tumblr.com/).

Blue was curled into a ball against Ronan on Monmouth’s much abused couch—knees pulled up to her chest, forehead pressed into them, arms wrapped over her head. She was absolutely not shaking, no matter what he said.

“You do know he can’t come through the screen for you, right?” Ronan crunched his popcorn loudly. It was a wonder the movie was affecting her as much as it was, as tethered as he was keeping her to the here and now. It would be annoying if she didn’t suspect he was doing it on purpose.

“Ronan,” she said into her jeans. “We spend our time in a cave that can bend our fears for its own purposes. The odds that I’m going to be murdered by some asshole in red leather and a motorcycle helmet because you refused to watch Grease are higher than they should be!”

“I will not let you get murdered by some asshole in red leather,” he said, and punctuated it by poking her in the shoulder.

“You can’t promise that.”

“I can. It listens to me.”

Blue tilted her head up. “Does it listen to everything you want?”

“Well, not everything. Why?” He tilted the bowl toward her and she took a handful of popcorn. She picked through it before putting a few pieces into her mouth.

On the screen the heroine was running through a series of white clinical corridors, trying desperately to escape the murderous experiment of her captor. Ronan might have had a point about the universality of psychological thrillers really, because who among them hadn’t ever felt that way?

“I don’t know. I was just thinking, if there was something that you really wanted that you couldn’t have. Can you manifest it?”

“I can’t just build you a Gansey, if that’s what you’re asking.”

She knew that wasn’t quite true, but there were ethics in dream beings that she felt need to be addressed more seriously before anyone made any demands on that end. It also wasn’t what she’d really been asking. The synth line from the movie score seeped between them as he studied her in the glow from the screen.

“Do you ever think about what you are?”

“I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I found out.” He wiped his hands together over the popcorn bowl, placed it on the floor, and then turned to face her, pulling his feet up onto the couch so that their toes were touching. “I mean, I’m not really a person am I?”

“No, you are. What else would you be?”

“I feel like one, but you know, I bet Matthew feels like one too. I bet my mother felt like one before…” his voice broke, but he maintained eye contact. Ronan Lynch was a force of nature when he was staring down the impossible and demanding it become possible and more often than not she’d seen him react that same way to his own fear. Blue wondered if that was a side effect of his birth or his upbringing. Or if it mattered for him. If it mattered for her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Fathers.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

“I just don’t know anything about him. Or how I’m supposed to feel about him. Or if I’m at all like him. I didn’t know if the cave might have an echo stored somewhere.”

“Like a computer hard drive?”

“Why not? Magic is electricity, right? Like people?”

He tilted his head back and looked up toward the high windows. “I don’t know. I’ve never studied it. I only know what I can do. Maybe,” he said. “I think what Adam does is definitely to do with electricity of some kind.”

“We’ll have to be extra vigilant of murderers in red leather though, okay?”

“You’re such a wuss.” Ronan reached over and ruffled her hair.

She tried to retaliate, but it wasn’t as fun for either of them with no hair to be messed up. Instead she stretched her legs out and settled against him just in time for jump scare involving a humanoid tar creature. Blue buried her face into his chest.

“Never again!” she yelled, and punched him in the thigh. “Next week it’s definitely Grease!”

(As a side note, Beyond the Black Rainbow is a terrifying movie and Ronan is mean for making her watch it. Excellent score, though.)


	10. Things you said when you thought I was asleep (Ronan Lynch & Blue Sargent)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112726491439/ronan-blue-12), written for [lisapizza](http://lisapizza.tumblr.com/). (With bonus Pynch interaction.)

She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, it was just that the drone of the highway under the BMW’s tires and the monotony of Ronan’s electronic music had gotten to her, drumming the endless feeling of all of it into her brain and lulling her off. Blue comes to and realizes all at once that the BMW is stopped and the BMW is off and she is alone in the dark of the night, curled over in the passenger seat. She cracks her eyes expecting to see one of the familiar gas stations off of 64, but instead it’s the St. Agnes parking lot.

Ronan is standing outside of the car with his hands in his pockets and Adam is coming toward them. He reaches out his hand and Ronan takes it, pulling him back until the car rocks gently as Ronan leans into it and Adam leans into him. Blue feels like she should stop looking, like she’s encroaching on something incredibly private, but it’s such a fascinating new development that she can’t help but to keep her eyes cracked and her head down as if she’s still peacefully zonked out.

Their words are muffled through the door, but clear enough anyway.

“You brought her here?” Adam says.

“She was asleep, I didn’t want to wake her yet.” Ronan raises his arms over his head, stretching, and then drops them onto Adam’s shoulders. “It’s been a long day.”

“I can imagine. See anything cool?”

“We went to the Air & Space hangar before we left this morning. I might have found my new calling.”

Adam laughs quietly. “Astronaut? Somehow I can’t imagine you jettisoned into the black for weeks on end.”

“Don’t be dumb,” Ronan says. “WWI ace fighter pilot.”

“You do realize that you want to be Snoopy when you grow up.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Adam rests his hands on Ronan’s elbows where they meet his shoulders and leans forward. They kiss cautiously and Blue thinks furiously about all of the times she’s seen them together in the last month, trying to find the clues that would lead to this. She comes up with a handful of glances, but wonders how much she’s missed being as wrapped up as she was in the search for her mother and for Glendower and in tiptoeing around her feelings for Gansey. They’d been so careful about Adam’s feelings when maybe they didn’t need to be.

“You know Gansey puts himself into a fit every time you take her away, don’t you?” Adam says.

Ronan snorts. “Gansey puts himself into a fit if we run out of orange juice. And he knows I’m not going to let anything happen to her.”

“Hmm,” Adam says. “I’m not sure it’s her he’s worried about.”

“He thinks we’re secretly plotting world domination doesn’t he?”

“Not so secretly, even.” Adam sighs and presses his forehead to Ronan’s. “You can’t deny that you’re both forces to be reckoned with. What will us mere mortals do when you make your bid for power?”

“You,” Ronan says, kissing Adam quickly. “Are not a mere mortal.”

“And yet, still not drafted to the cause.”

Ronan pulls away and looks down at her in the seat behind him. She hopes her eyes are closed enough that he can’t tell she’s awake. “I like spending time with her,” he says, turning back to Adam.

“Sister you never had?”

“Better,” Ronan says. “She’s cool.”

Blue feels warm. She and Ronan had sort of fallen against each other in Gansey and Adam’s absences, but they hadn’t ever discussed whether or not they were friends in their own right or just lonely acquaintances. In that moment, she might love Ronan more than she thinks she could love Gansey if she lets herself. He is a brother to her, through and through.

Adam and Ronan kiss again and Ronan pushes away from the car. “Better get this one home,” he says. “See you tomorrow?”

“Of course.” Adam kisses Ronan’s cheek and then turns to head back up to his apartment.

Ronan watches him until he gets to the stairs and then comes around the car and gets back in. He sits for a moment before starting it up.

“If you tell Gansey before Adam is ready I will feed you to Chainsaw,” he says.

“And here I thought I’d done so well pretending to still be asleep!” Blue unfurls herself and leans over the left hand side of the seat studying him. “I won’t tell,” she says, holding her pinky out.

Ronan hooks it in his own and shakes her hand. “Thanks,” he says. “In that case I won’t take back what I said about you.”

“I won’t tell Gansey that either,” she says. “Just to be safe.”


	11. Things you said at 1 am (Ronan Lynch & Blue Sargent)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112795438279/are-you-still-accepting-prompts-if-yes-are-you), written for [jehanthepoet](http://jehanthepoet.tumblr.com/).

Blue is sitting at the base of a tree with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. It’s colder than she thought it would be when they’d left that morning, so she’s dressed poorly for sitting in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, but she thinks that maybe her shivering adds to the newness of the experience. There’s a mist seeping up from the ground making everything hazy and the moon is hanging heavy over the treeline casting her in the sort of light she thought only existed in pretentious movies. Everything about it is beautiful and she loves it so much it almost hurts.

There’s a movement in the brush behind her and then Ronan is sitting cross legged next to her. He drapes his leather jacket over her knees, even though that leaves him in sweatpants and a long sleeved t-shirt. It says CREW across the chest and it must be Gansey’s. She wonders if she’ll ever be able to share things and silences and moments with someone as easily as Gansey and Ronan do. If anyone will ever understand her as thoroughly as they seem to understand each other without needing to say anything at all.

They sit together and listen to the insects humming in the forest around them for several long, slipping moments.

“You get lost on the way to the bathroom?” Ronan says finally.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

She’s never been camping before, and though she likes to feel like she’s close to nature in her home it’s totally different being in the middle of it in those dark moments that most people let pass away without notice. She’d been tucked into her sleeping bag with the sound the forest thrumming through her wondering if that was how Adam felt all of the time and how he ever got anything done. It had been too much. It still is.

“That’s my line,” he says.

She looks sidelong at him and he nudges her with his elbow, not to antagonize her, just to say  _I’m here too_. They can’t touch the people they want to, so they’ve started touching each other. The way a traveller might keep a stone from home in his pocket. They way Ronan explained rosaries to her. She doesn’t know if she believes in holiness, but she believes in needing people and Ronan seems to think that that’s holy too.

“I want to go everywhere,” she says. “I didn’t realize it until I met all of you. I mean, there were places I wanted to go and to see, but they felt far away and impossible, something a future me might do. You guys make it feel possible and now it’s all I think about.”

“Then let’s go,” Ronan says, as if that’s all it takes.

“It’s not that easy.”

“But you know all of us.”

He’s offering her something he knows she won’t take. He’s saying  _we have money and we can get you what you want_ , but money has never been the answer to her questions and she’s not going to let it be now, regardless of how much Gansey and Ronan don’t understand. Adam understands, but they don’t talk about it. Or maybe they don’t talk about it because he understands.

“I just don’t think it would be the same if it was handed to me. I want to earn my experiences. I want to climb mountains, not drop down on them from helicopters.”

“Rich people climb mountains. Everest is an expensive feat.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she says, because it’s what he would say to her.

“You worry too much about where your happiness comes from.” Ronan shifts, crosses his arms and stretches his legs out. He leans back against the tree and jostles her shoulder. “Stop worrying. Just let it happen, God knows it’s infrequent enough.”

Blue swallows down the fear that’s been growing in her since she realized she’d started thinking of them as ‘her boys’. “What if I don’t know how to tell it when I see it?”

“How do you feel right now?”

She tilts sideways and rests her head on his shoulder, curling her arms and legs in tighter under the jacket. “Like I want to stay here. Like I don’t want the morning to come. Like I’m tired of arguing and waiting and searching.”

“Do you think you were happier before us?”

She feels him tense, just a bit, waiting. “No,” she says. It’s the easiest thing she’s said all day. “You’re all frustrating and annoying and terrible, but I guess I’m used to it now.”

“Because you are a walk in the park.”

“I know,” she says. “I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to you jerks.”

Ronan doesn’t argue. He doesn’t say anything at all. The mist thickens around them and the insect sounds are punctuated by the calls of night birds as they fly from branch to branch above them, stalking their prey, free to go anywhere they please as long as their wings hold out.


	12. Things you didn’t say at all (Ronan Lynch and Blue Sargent)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113398826794/not-sure-if-youre-still-accepting-prompts-but-on), written for [unclebenjen](http://unclebenjen.tumblr.com/).

“Thanks for letting me come tonight,” she said.

Ronan reached over and ruffled her hair, knocking a few of her clips askew. “Sure.”

Blue huffed and made an exaggerated show of replacing the clips where they belonged. Behind them there were bright stadium lights and people cheering or clapping and loud cars still taking runs on the drag strip. Ahead of them was the night creeping in at the edge of the light’s reach as they walked back across the bumpy dirt field to where Ronan had parked the BMW.

“Maybe next time you can enter a race.”

Blue laughed at the thought of even attempting such a thing. “Do you remember the last time I drove your car?”

“You did admirably. Won’t have to worry about merging at least,” he said, and pulled the keys from his pocket, jangling them in his hands as they approached the car. “It’s not a bad way to learn.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your advice on life lessons.” She stood to the side as Ronan unlocked her door for her and then climbed in and reached across the car to unlock his door before he could get there.

Ronan slipped in and put the keys in the ignition. “Hey, I’ve learned things.”

Blue couldn’t argue that. Some of Joseph Kavinsky’s friends had come up to them earlier in the evening while they were loitering at the bottom of the bleachers and it had been a surreal experience. Without a focal point for her disdain they were just boys. She’d never let herself give a thought to what friends did when they lost one of their number. It seemed they went on the way they had been, only minus a voice. The thought of that made her cold inside and she had slipped her arm around Ronan’s waist so she could put it inside of his jacket. He wrapped her up in it, still talking to the other boys. None of them even batted an eye and she realized that she wasn’t as anxious about people seeing her with Ronan as she was when she was with Gansey. She was still working that out.

Ronan started the car. “Do you want food?”

“I could steal some of your fries, sure.”

“If you’re nice I’ll get you your own fries.”

“When have I ever been nice?” she asked.

Ronan was grinning as he checked out the back window before pulling out of his makeshift spot. “A pair of vipers, the two of us,” he said.

“I think I’d rather be something else.”

“Mongoose,” he said, nodding to himself. “Those can take down cobras. And they’re kind of cute, I guess.”

“Not vipers?”

“That remains to be seen,” he said fondly.

“Let’s never find out.” Blue pulled her knees up to her chest and closed her eyes, let the weak country street lights pulse over her as they made their way back to the highway. As fun as it was to bicker with Ronan, she knew enough to know she didn’t want to ever really have to go against him for anything with a real consequence. Neither of them knew when to quit when it came to what they wanted.

Ronan flicked on the radio but left it low enough that even with the music filling the space between them she felt like the anticipatory quiet was growing thinner. He had very carefully not asked her what she was running from that evening. He would continue to not ask, because he was him and he was used to keeping things inside, but he also knew she wasn’t. It was really kind of spooky the way he had silently worked her out in the time they’d known each other. Maybe it was just the things about them that were the same that amplified the things that weren’t and made them easy for him to see.

“I just don’t know what to do with him,” she said finally.

“Butternut?” Ronan asked.

“Artemus,” she said, because he was very obviously not the man her mother had fallen for those eighteen or so years ago. The man they’d brought back from the cave was not Butternut. He was a museum piece that was sleeping in Persephone’s empty bed, an oddity. A quiet oddity who looked at Blue as if she was a puzzle that needed to be solved instead of a daughter that needed to be talked to. Artemus rarely spoke. “What do you say to a father you’ve never known?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Whenever my father was away for a long period of time I would rush out to show him what I’d created while he was gone. You don’t have any macaroni jewelry or tacky clay Christmas ornaments you can present him with, do you?”

Blue always had a hard time picturing Ronan as the soft, smiling child he must have been before his father died, but she could absolutely see him excitedly showing his father all the things he’d dreamed in his absence. That was something they shared. As far as Blue could tell there wasn’t anything she shared with Artemus. It seemed impossible to reconcile her life with the 14th century world Artemus must have been a boy in. What was there about her that he would have cause to care about besides her DNA? They hadn’t even known what that was then.

“Something tells me he wouldn’t know what to do with them, even if I could find where mom has stashed those things.”

“You don’t have to love him, you know,” Ronan said.

“I know. I’ve just wanted this my whole life and now I have it and I don’t know what to do with it. I think I understand why Gansey is so anxious about finding Glendower. What is isn’t nearly as exciting as what could be. The present just feels so final, even when you know it exists infinitely.” And then, because it had just occurred to her, she said, “ If you could have your dad back, what would you say to him?”

Ronan was quiet for a few minutes. Blue let the night wash over her as she waited for him.

“I don’t know. There are certainly a lot of things I didn’t ever say that I wish I could.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing important.” The way he said it made it clear that whatever it was was very important.

“I used to keep a notebook of things I would say to my father if I ever met him, but that was when he was just a man.”

“Fathers aren’t just men,” Ronan said. It struck her as oddly wise coming from him, but it was probably less about being wise and more about how his father hadn’t been. “Sometimes I think that if I could have my dad back I would hold on to him for as long as possible. And then I would punch him.”

“That sounds…violent,” she said. “I don’t think I want to punch Artemus.”

“No, but Artemus didn’t teach you to punch people. My dad did. Even his absences made us who we are. Your dad wasn’t absent, he was non-existent. It’s okay to be ambivalent about him. It’s okay not to love him.”

“You said that already.”

“I didn’t think you heard me the first time.”

They pulled into the parking lot of an all night waffle place and Ronan parked under the sign. The interior of the car was bathed in cheery yellow light that seemed to mock her indecision.  _That_ , thought Blue,  _I could punch_. If only she could figure out how to punch light. Maybe she could put Gansey on it. He was good at researching the impossible.

Ronan turned the car off and pulled the keys out of the ignition. “Does it hurt to have him?” he asked.

“A little, yeah, why?”

“I don’t know. It hurts to not have mine and I was just thinking that maybe it’s the change that hurts. Maybe it’s not always about that person or who you want them to be. Maybe people are just bad with things they can’t control.”

“Especially us,” she said.

Ronan sighed lightly. “Especially us.” He climbed out of the car. Blue gave herself a few moments to consider her impotent frustration and then she climbed out too. Ronan was waiting for her, leaning against the rear fender. “How about this, for as long as it takes us to eat a stupid amount of cheap diner food, my dad is alive and your dad is not a man we just pulled from a magic cave.”

“Can I borrow your dad?”

Ronan slung his arm around her shoulder and scooped her towards the door of the restaurant. “You wouldn’t want him. Did I tell you he was in an honest to god bar fight the other week?”

“No,” she said. “Do tell.”

So he did. He even roped their waitress into it. Blue didn’t know if it was a true memory or if it was just a story he was making up on the fly, embellishing it by using his hands emphatically and mimicking his father’s accent whenever he could. Either way, Ronan seemed to enjoy spinning the tale as much as she enjoyed listening to it. He was explaining about a broken mandolin when Blue started laughing and for just a few moments her hurt was covered over and felt as far away as Artemus had always been. Ronan had told them many times that if it worked in the dream it worked in real life. She thought that, if they were lucky, he could make that true for almost anything.


	13. Things you said around a campfire (Blue Sargent & Adam Parrish & Noah Czerny & Richard Campbell Gansey III & Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/115275944199/blue-adam-noah-gansey-ronan-23-things-you-said), written for [lisapizza](http://lisapizza.tumblr.com/).

“We could play never have I ever,” Noah says. He’s sitting close to Blue on the log, drawing warmth off of her as she’s drawing it from the fire. Even so, he’s fading into the dark of the forest around his edges.

“That wouldn’t be quite fair,” Ronan says.

“How do you mean?” Gansey asks.

Ronan smirks. “Never have I ever been dead.”

Noah’s lips press into a moue and he dims even more.

“You don’t have to be a jerk,” Blue says. She runs her hand up and down over Noah’s back as he flickers slightly.

Gansey looks down at the beer bottle in his hand. “Ah,” he says. “We should probably try for something else anyway. It wouldn’t be safe to be drunk out here.”

“Speak for yourself,” Ronan says. “I am always safe.” He punctuates his statement by finishing off his bottle and pulling another from the cooler. It makes a sharp hissing sound when he opens it.

“You’re the only two drinking anyway,” Adam says. “Unless you’re counting on Blue and me to take in so much sugar and caffeine it impairs our thinking.”

“What about truth or dare?” Blue asks. She works hard to keep her voice from trembling as she says it, because it feels like a dangerous suggestion. She very purposefully does not look across Noah to where Gansey is sitting on the other side of him.

“That would be anticlimactic,” Adam says.

Blue thinks he’s probably right. There’s only one secret between the five of them that’s worth anything, and both she and Adam would dive off the mountain before they revealed it.

“It’s something, though,” Gansey says. “Who goes first?”

Ronan tilts his head back, looking up at the canopy of trees. “Noah, bring us a leaf from the top of that tree.”

“I can’t go up there!” Noah squeaks, voice pitched high with nerves. “What if I fall?”

Ronan raises an eyebrow, conveying the previously stated fact that Noah couldn’t possibly get hurt, on account of how he’s already dead. Blue wonders if Ronan has some sort of death news quota to reach every day and pictures him gleefully writing obituaries for the local paper.

Noah sighs. “Fine.” He disappears and over the next several minutes the four of them are showered in red/orange/yellow leaves that get caught in their hair and clothes.

Gansey stands up to shake the hood of his jacket free of leaf crumbs and Blue stifles a giggle at the fastidiousness of him. She reaches out and plucks a broad red leaf off his back and tucks it behind her ear. It scratches, but she likes the idea of it fanning out against her hair.

When Gansey sits down again it’s closer to her than he had been. Blue hazards a look at Adam across the fire, but he isn’t even paying attention to them. He’s still looking up at the canopy with his hands resting flat against the log to either side of him and his knee pressed carelessly against Ronan’s. They’re not sitting close together, but they’re both spread out as if subconsciously reaching for something. Ronan is looking at Adam, which doesn’t surprise Blue in the slightest.

Noah reappears on the other side of Gansey. “Adam, truth or dare?”

“Oh,” Adam says, letting his gaze float back down. “Truth.”

“If Cabeswater could give you one power, what would you want?”

“That’s easy, invisibility.”

“Come now, Parrish,” Ronan says. “Don’t you get enough of that in your real life.”

“I don’t know,” Adam says pointedly. “I don’t seem to be wanting for attention lately. What would you want?”

Ronan ignores the first part entirely. “To fly, obviously.”

“Not the power to read people’s minds?” Gansey asks.

“Why would I give a shit what people think about me?”

“Maybe it’s not about what and it’s more about if,” Blue says.

Ronan levels her with a look and shifts away from Adam. “Either could be damning,” he says.

“Certainly for that other person,” Gansey teases.

“Why  _Dick_ ,” Ronan says. “Do you never dream of me anymore? I thought we had something special.”

Gansey laughs and takes another sip of his beer. He’s been nursing the same one for an hour while Ronan steadily works his way through a six pack. Blue isn’t sure why Gansey is drinking it to begin with, but there’s something in the way the air is turning as fall becomes winter that feels electric, like possibility. Like change. It’s the perfect sort of night for small rebellions.

“Blue,” Adam says. “truth or dare?”

“Dare,” she says without thinking. She immediately reconsiders.

Adam cocks his head and studies her. He clearly hadn’t been expecting her to pick dare either. Then he looks at her steadily over the fire and winks. “I dare you to call for the Major.”

Blue is lost for a moment, but Adam is holding her gaze and there’s an amused tilt to his lips. Ronan and Gansey are looking between them in confusion and Noah is smiling his secret hiding smile. “Oh!” she says finally. She goes searching through her mind for an appropriate name and comes up with one from some vampire book she’d read the year before. “Not Major Hale! That’s stupidly dangerous, Adam. You know what happened to those kids last year.”

Adam looks down at his shoes, nonchalant. “Well, if you’d like to go for a truth then.”

Gansey says, “Who is Major Hale?” at the same time Ronan says, “Wait, an actual ghost?”

“Hey!” Noah protests.

Ronan waves a hand at him. “You know what I mean, you’re a special case.”

“He was only one of the most fearsome soldiers in the whole of the Confederate Army,” Blue says, attempting to spin a tale worthy of her mock panic. “I’m surprised he hasn’t come up in any of your reading about the area. Practically bare handedly killed his way up through the ranks and then up to the northern aggressors. He was finally stabbed straight through the heart during a skirmish. They say he’s trapped on the path of the blood he spilled and if you call out to him three times under a full moon he’ll appear.”

Gansey looks up through the trees again and notes the heaviness of the moon. “And then what?”

“What do you mean and then what?” Adam asks.

“He appears and does what?” Ronan chimes in. “Offers you his Confederate gold? Murders you in your sleep? Gives excellent back rubs?”

“I bet his back rubs are horrible,” Blue says. “Bony hands.”

“And cold,” Adam supplies.

“I don’t have to take this slander,” Noah says, and fades out.

“I’m gonna do it,” Blue says. She stands up, squares her shoulders, pivots on her heel, and walks away from the safe warmth of the fire and marches into the dark of the woods. She only makes it a couple hundred yards before she can hear the boys crashing through the brush behind her.

There’s half a second where she flounders, not sure of what to do next. It will be easy enough to stop somewhere and shout a name a few times, but the setting has to be just right. It shouldn’t be hard to find something appropriately mythic this close to Cabeswater, even here in the regular forest. As if the forest is answering her, she comes upon a small round clearing where the moon is flooding the inner grass and rock with greying light. She stops at the edge and waits for them to catch up, wrapping her arms around herself and trying to look appropriately nervous.

“You don’t have to do this,” Gansey says, stepping up to the right of her.

Ronan brushes against her left shoulder. “Is it too late to ask what happened to the kids from last year?”

“Run through the heart,” Adam intones ominously, “like with a sword.”

“The heart?” Ronan says. He sounds far away, like he’s imagining it. “Like he was? That seems a bit on the nose, even for a ghost story.”

“Yeah,” Adam says. “You have to protect your heart, or he’ll take it for a trophy.”

“Worry about your own heart, Parrish,” Ronan says, as casually as if he’s giving them the time.

Gansey is fidgeting and his elbow grazes hers. “How have we not heard about this?”

Blue scoffs. “Maybe if you weren’t so self-absorbed and paid attention to us  _poor people_ you might have!”

Gansey ducks his head and runs his hand lightly over his hair, chastened.

“Well then,” Ronan says. “Let’s get on with it. It’s fucking cold here in the dark.”

Nodding, Blue hesitantly makes her way to the center of the clearing. When she turns back to look at them they all seem to be fading into the darkness, hazy around the edges just like Noah. She realizes that, if she stays in Henrietta, one day she’ll see Adam’s shadow on the corpse road and possibly Ronan’s. It makes her shiver for real.

She looks up at the moon and tries to remember how these things are usually done. Blue places her hands over her eyes and starts to slowly turn in a circle. “MarjorJasperHale! MarjorJasperHale! MarjorJasperHale!” she calls, turning faster with each shout. Then she whips her hands away from her eyes and looks out into the darkness, toppling slightly with light dizziness. Nothing happens. Behind her the boys are silent.

Blue shrugs and turns around. “I knew nothing would happen,” she shouts, and starts back across the clearing toward them.

Just then a breeze kicks up and whips past her, causing her hair to flutter across her face and her hoodie to cling to her side. Leaves skitter across the ground around her. Something hits her then, something sticky and fine like cobwebs and she’s trapped in it. She starts to flail and trips over a rock, falling with a thud to the hard, cold ground.

“Jane!” Gansey shouts.

“Fucking shit!” she hears Ronan yelp.

Gansey skids across the ground to her in a diving slide and pulls her into his arms. He quickly places his flat, crossed hands over her heart. Somewhere behind her a tree branch cracks and makes a ruckus as it bounces to the ground. Adam shouts Ronan’s name.

It’s over almost as quickly as it started and everything goes back to being still and quiet except for the four sets of heavy breaths punctuating the sounds of night insects. Blue looks up at Gansey, suddenly very aware of how close they are. Her shoulder is pressed against his knee and his hands are on her chest so close to her breast. She can feel her heart fluttering under the warmth of him. She forgets to breathe for a second. He makes eye contact with her and does the same. She sits up and looks around.

On the edge of the woods Aam and Ronan are standing flush against each other and Ronan has his arm around Adam’s shoulders, holding him tight. Adam is gripping Ronan’s wrist where it’s sitting against his collarbone. He’s looking at Blue with wide eyes. She just shakes her head at him. She doesn’t know what’s happened either.

Then a spirited giggle breaks through the night and Noah appears, sitting on the ground next to her. Gansey groans.

“God damn it, Noah!” Ronan yells, which only makes Noah laugh harder.

Noah leans in and places the tip of his pointer finger to the place on Blue’s chest where Gansey’s hands had been. “Protect it,” he says, and then flickers out again.

“Fuck this shit,” Ronan announces to the forest. He roughly shoves Adam away from him and turns to stalk back to the camp fire. Adam follows behind him, cracking up. Blue’s heart does feel stronger after that, because Adam so rarely laughs these days. It’s a daring, exuberant sound.

Gansey draws his legs up so that he can cross them and doesn’t make a move to follow Adam and Ronan back. “You made that up,” he accuses. He’s grinning right through it.

“Guilty as charged,” Blue says. She wipes at her face over and over, trying to get rid of the spiderwebs she can still feel clinging to her lips and nose. “But I didn’t know Noah was going to do that. I don’t think Adam did either.”

“Hm,” Gansey hums. “I imagine not, though I think he’s more startled by Ronan than he was by the tree branch.”

“Are you?” she asks.

“No,” Gansey says, and doesn’t offer any other explanation.

It’s something she and Ronan have discussed in a roundabout way several times now, but she’s had the impression that Ronan didn’t want to discuss it with Gansey. Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe the person Gansey has been talking to is Adam. Her stomach tumbles a little with hope for Ronan.

Here in the dark, with the danger having passed and that small swelling hope and her heart slowing to a canter, she feels invincible. She reaches out before she realizes what she’s doing and places her hand against Gansey’s cheek.

“Jane,” he says quietly, and nuzzles into it.

The electric possibility in the air is transmuted into something else between them in her touch and it zips through her. He reaches into a pocket for a mint leaf and holds it out for her. Blue trails her fingers down Gansey’s cheek and jaw and neck and shoulder and arm until they pass over the leaf. She picks it up and places it against her tongue.

“We should get back,” he says. “You’re shaking.” He’s right, even though she hadn’t realized she was until he pointed it out.

Gansey stands up and dusts his jeans off before holding his hand out for her to grab. She clasps his fingers with hers and lets him tug her up. He slides his arm across her shoulder and holds her close to him as they make their way back through the shadowed brush in the same way Ronan had been holding Adam. It’s a short lived comfort. He pulls away just as the fire comes into focus.

Ronan is standing outside the ring of logs with another bottle of beer to his lips. Adam is sitting with his eyes closed, leaning back so that his head is tipped against Ronan’s hip. Ronan’s free hand is tangled in Adam’s hair. They look like heating coils in the orange glow of the fire—their pale skin and shirts reflecting the light, their postures reflecting the easy curve of them into one another.   

“I think that’s enough excitement for one night,” Gansey says. He picks up his discarded bottle and pours the rest of it into the grass.

“Who would’ve thought we’d live to see the day when Richard Campbell Gansey III has had enough of an adventure?” Blue says.

“Never have I ever,” Adam answers, his soft, tired accent conveying just as much contentment as Blue feels pooling inside of her.


	14. Things you said after it was over (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch/Richard Campbell Gansey III/Blue Sargent)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113196250509/hey-i-love-your-fics-esp-the-pynch-ones-if), written for an anonymous user.

The Barns was very different at night. Without the lushness of the place to draw her eyes Blue’s ears focused on the singing of the insects and the cries of the nightbirds after prey and the wind brushing softly through the trees. It was also the sort of dark she had seldom known, because of how far back it was set into the hills, away from streets and people. She thought that maybe Ronan’s dad had been trying to carve a piece of Ireland out of the Virginian landscape and she wondered if he had also been banished from his home, if that was just a piece of what it meant to be a dreamer and a Lynch. **  
**

There was a part of her that felt sorrier for Ronan the more she learned about him. Not that she would ever share that, because it was sure to infuriate him. It wasn’t pity. It was more like she was afraid for him, because he hardly ever seemed to be afraid for himself. Not that there was anything to fear currently as he was home finally and he was safe.

Ronan was stretched across the couch in the sitting room with his head in Adam’s lap, his legs propped over Gansey and hanging off the couch’s arm, and his fingers curled into Blue’s where he’d dangled his hand over the edge. Blue was leaning into the base of the couch from her spot on the floor, head tilted into Gansey’s thigh. They had all just naturally settled in around Ronan as if the events of the day needed tending to now that they were over. It might be the safest Ronan had been since his father died. It might be the safest any of them had ever been.

When Ronan had told them he was going to come out and start cataloging the dream things it seemed natural to make it a group project. They were all of them tangled up in each other anyway, had all dug too deep into the affairs of each other’s families. Why not physically rummage through Ronan’s past?

Gansey had been to the Barns when Ronan’s family was whole, but he was also the one among them with the most desperate sense of wonder, so everything he touched that afternoon had become magnificent or beautiful or exciting. Much in the same way Ronan and Adam and Blue felt they had become all of those things when Gansey touched them.

Adam had been to the Barns many times just as it was now–empty and quiet and waiting–working on the dream things with Ronan and trying to figure out how to wake the dream beings. For him it was all matter of fact. If there was any sense of wonder over the impossible made possible in Adam it was reserved for Ronan himself. Blue couldn’t fault him for that. Their new relationship was still in the breathtaking stage and it made her ache to know that not only had she hurt Adam for no reason in falling for Gansey, but that he wasn’t ever meant to be hers in the same way she wasn’t ever meant to be his. She worried that she’d stolen happiness from him in the form of time.

For her own part Blue had made herself chief cataloguer and note taker, afraid of what her touch might do to amplify any unknown abilities in the objects. Ronan seemed to be grateful to her for that, because he trusted not only her analysis and opinion, but also just her as a friend. He’d trusted her with his truth and his feelings about Adam before he’d told either of the boys. He had trusted her with parts of himself that he was afraid to show other people and in return she was also grateful to him.

Ronan would never admit it to himself, but his trust–which was as fierce as his love–warped the people and objects around him in the same way Gansey’s wonder did. For the two of them, the sometimes singular entity that was Gansey&Ronan, the world reached out and asked to be found and believed in, and they did. Adam healed what they found. Blue understood and amplified. So together they’d spent the day sorting through miracles and then settled down for the evening, tired and worn and physically tangled together in the same way they were emotionally.

“I don’t want this to end,” Gansey said. His voice was hushed, hollowed out the same way his cheeks and eyes looked in the dancing light from the fireplace. His left hand was idly picking at the pilling in Ronan’s socks and he was running the fingers of his right hand lightly through Blue’s hair.

“Okay,” Ronan said. “Let’s just stay.”

“We have a test Monday morning,” Adam reminded them.

“That’s not what I mean,” Gansey said. “Though this is nice too.”

“I think he knows what you mean,” Blue said.

Ronan squeezed her fingers and she squeezed his back. She tilted her head up to catch Adam’s eye and he shook his head lightly.  _No_ , he was saying,  _I haven’t told him our secret_. Blue let out a sigh of relief.

“I just won’t know how to define myself without this.”

“ _This_  doesn’t have to end,” Adam said. His voice was so full of uncharacteristic hope that Blue wanted to cry. How did they become the whole world to each other? Adam continued carefully, “We’ll still be here for you. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Of course you will,” Gansey said. He’d pulled his hand away from Ronan’s sock and was pressing his thumb to his bottom lip, the way he often did when he was lost. “Don’t be ridiculous. You have your own lives to live. What is it they say? Youth is fleeting on purpose?”

“I don’t know who they are,” Ronan said. “But they’re idiots.”

Gansey smiled over Ronan’s certainty the way he always did, because as much as he was the leader of this cause he’d roped them into, he’d been just as changed by them as they were by him. Ronan’s unfailing belief in the infinity of the now and the possibility in the very firmament around them gave Gansey a much needed anchor.

“I would never forgive myself if I held any of you back,” he said.

Ronan let out a single bark of a laugh and Gansey squeezed his calf, the two of them having an old and familiar argument about the worthiness of Ronan’s life without having to say anything at all.

“Hey,” Blue said, because she needed to hear it. “Stop worrying about the future. It’s going to happen anyway. This is what’s important. This now.”  _This love_ , she thought, but it felt too heavy and obvious to say out loud.

“I suppose you’re right, Jane,” Gansey said.

“When have you known her to be wrong?” Adam asked. He leaned forward to kiss Ronan, as if putting a period on his point.


	15. Things you said when you were scared (Blue Sargent/Richard Campbell Gansey III)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112564681934/blue-gansey-18), written for [lisapizza](http://lisapizza.tumblr.com/).

They’re not in  _the_  cave, just  _a_  cave, a normal set of caverns not sitting on any magical highways Gansey can suss out in his research. Neither of them are too keen to go back into  _the_  cave immediately, especially with Adam and Ronan so conspicuously missing as they have been lately. But still, there was a lot about their few first ventures they hadn’t been prepared for, so Gansey suggests they get in some good solid spelunking time before they make another attempt at Glendower. 

All things considered, Blue is less than thrilled to be hanging off a 20 foot ledge regardless of the circumstances. It does make her feel slightly better knowing that Gansey is somewhere beneath her and she can probably break her fall with his face if she needs to.  _Somewhere_ , because she is very resolutely not looking down. 

“Come on, Jane!” Gansey calls. “You can’t just hang there for the rest of your life!”

“You just watch me!” she shouts back, hating the waver in her voice and finding comfort in how the light from her headlamp is brushing against the daylight seeping over the crest of the ridge above her. 

“I can’t leave you here!” he yells up to her. “Your mother is dating an actual assassin and they’ll never find my body!”

“You think Mr. Gray is scarier than Calla?”

“I take that back,” he calls, sounding grim. “They’ll never find my body, because there won’t be enough left to find." 

Blue decides not to examine how this is one of the most pleasant thoughts she’s had in twenty minutes, and it’s not exactly pleasant. "I can’t do it,” she says finally. “I don’t know how.”

“That’s why we’re practicing,” Gansey says patiently in his professor voice. “So you can learn how. Just remember what I showed you." 

"What if something happens to the rope?" 

"I checked everything three times. The gear is solid." 

"What if I do something to the rope?”

“You’re not going to do anything to the rope. Well, do you have that knife on you? Jane, don’t do anything to the rope just to prove me wrong." 

Blue runs her hand along the place the rope is tethered to her harness and doesn’t answer. 

"Blue, listen to me. Just focus on my voice, okay?” Gansey says, and it must be serious now. His voice is clear and confident and strong and it’s almost impossible for her not to listen to it when it sounds like this. “If you fall I will catch you." 

"That’s stupid,” she says. “It will break both of our necks." 

"No, you’re not listening. Here, anywhere, it doesn’t matter. If you fall, I  _will_  catch you. I want you to let me do that if you need it. Can you?”

Blue doesn’t know how to answer that with words. Her pride won’t let her even begin to figure it out. But it does swell up into her chest and give her the courage to work her way down. With her feet on solid ground again she turns to look at Gansey. 

He’s luminescent in her headlamp, a moon with a massive, idiotic grin on his face. Before she knows what is happening he’s wrapped his arms around her tight. “I’m so proud of you,” he says quietly. His breath is causing her hair to tickle against her ear. 

She shifts, tilts her head up so that their cheeks brush together and is almost drowned by the want of him that has been steadily flooding into her for months now.  _This is good_ , she thinks,  _this can be enough_.  

“Yes,” she says, swallowing down pride and ego and fear of the future. He hugs her tighter. 


	16. Things you said that I wish you hadn’t (Blue Sargent/Richard Campbell Gansey III)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113115452149/blue-gansey-17), written for [getawaymachine](http://getawaymachine.tumblr.com/).

It plays through her mind for days after. She knows she’s being inattentive. The manager at Nino’s pulls her aside to ask what’s wrong. The other women of Fox Way stop trying to include her in conversations full stop, which is preferable to Orla, who gives her heavy, almost pitying looks whenever she comes into a room. **  
**

_I wish you could be kissed, Jane_ , he had said.

In that moment so had she, ignoring the fact that she could and had been kissed many times–by her family, by friends, by boys on the playground when they were all too young to know better but too old to not be imitating the world around them. Not that those were the same. Those weren’t the all-consuming flame that she wanted to settle in the hollow of her throat. The memories of them were just close enough to a mimic of it to deepen the ache.

 _What am I doing?_  

She almost doesn’t know who she is anymore and she can’t tell if it’s a normal side effect of growth or if she really is losing her mind over a boy. A stupid Raven boy, nonetheless, like she’s mocked other girls for doing over and over again. No, she has to lay down some rules she’ll stick to. She has to protect him, but also herself, because if he dies and it’s her fault then everything ends. She will lose the tangled family she’s come to need. She doesn’t know when she’d started applying the word  _need_  to them, but that has to stop too. She has to believe she’ll be able to go on without them.

Monmouth is a yawning, silent, and dark cave when she lets herself in. She peers through the crack in Ronan’s door and checks the bathroom/laundry/kitchen and Noah’s room and finds them all desolate in their emptiness. She hasn’t thought this far through, but she figures the boys should be back from wherever they’ve gone soon, so she perches on the edge of Gansey’s bed with her arms wrapped around herself to wait.

Blue feels Noah before she sees him. “It’s okay,” she says to the far off rafters. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“No one ever wants to be alone,” she hears him say. “Sometimes they think they do, but they don’t know what it feels like to be truly alone.” He appears at her elbow, also perched with his hands on his knees.

“And you do,” she says.

“Well, not entirely I don’t suppose,” he says. “Even when I wasn’t anything at all he still thought of me sometimes. True aloneness is not being missed.”

“Oh, Noah. As long as we’re alive you will never be alone.” She tilts her head sideways and checks the solidity of him. Her head comes to a pleasant rest on his shoulder. Blue’s scalp tingles with the coolness of it, but she doesn’t pull away. She’s never asked, but she assumes that there’s a transfer there, his cold for her warmth.

“There is,” he says. And, “thank you.” And, “you know you’re going to have to tell him.”

“I know. I just don’t want to change anything. It’s so perfect in the way that it’s not.”

“We all love you.” He reaches over and rests his hand on her knee. “In our own ways. Something as inconsequential as death has never altered love.”

Goosebumps raise up along her skin where his fingers are. “Inconsequential,” she echoes.

“It’s what Ronan would say.”

“Ronan does have a way of cutting through to the final meaning of things, doesn’t he?”

“It’s rare,” Noah agrees.

“I wish he had told me no.”

“Gansey is never going to tell you no. His mind rolls over you all of the time, even when he doesn’t want it to, trying to figure out how to be allowed to touch you the way that he wants.”

“Glad I’m not the only one.”

Noah flickers and her head dips a bit. “Don’t regret things,” he says. “Especially not warm things. You’ll wish you hadn’t.”

Blue picks her head up and looks at him. There’s a sad smile on his face. She leans in and presses a kiss to his check.

“Gansey is coming,” he says. “He’s alone. Well, not alone, but.” Then he disappears.

The second story door opens and Gansey comes through it, kicking his shoes off as he closes it behind him. He pauses for a second when he notices her, but recovers quickly. “Jane, what are you doing here in the dark?”

“Thinking,” she says.  _Regretting_ , she doesn’t say.

He hangs his head and it strikes her as an oddly bashful gesture for him. “I know, listen. I’ve been thinking about it too. I’m sorry. I–”

“Don’t.” Blue hops down off his bed and picks her way across the outskirts of Henrietta and around his pile of dirty laundry until she’s standing before him and looking up into his eyes. His face is so different from when they first met and she can’t tell if it’s time that’s changed him or their proximity to each other. As if maybe she can just decode him now. Not that it matters. Even if she can she can’t know what it means in the long run. That’s not a power she has, and he’s going to be taken from her before she gets a chance to figure it out. “I don’t want to kill you.”

“I don’t want to die,” he says lightly, as if it’s obvious, as if no one wants to die.

She can’t fault him for not understanding how serious all of it is, how time is running down for all of them in its own loping and looping manner, not when she hasn’t disclosed to him the simple difference between the possible and the inevitable. Still, she wishes he hadn’t said that either, in his small voice full of wonder, because it’s almost worse than the chaos of his touch. It’s almost resigned, and it almost pulls her heart open then and there. 


	17. Things you said that I wasn’t meant to hear (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112547011339/adam-ronan-20-narrowing-it-down-to-only-one-was), written for [allthroughoursplendor](http://allthroughoursplendor.tumblr.com/).

The BMW is parked outside of the church, but Ronan is not parked at the base of Adam’s door the way he’s come to expect. It’s been a long, lonely day for Adam, moving between his jobs and feeling unknowable, so he’s a little crestfallen not to have the company now that the idea has settled into his head. He shrugs out of his coveralls and tries to study for about twenty minutes before giving up and heading back downstairs.

He expects Ronan to be most of the way through a 6-pack of beer. Instead, the Ronan Adam finds is curiously sober, sitting quietly with his head tilted toward the rafters and his eyes closed. Adam sits gingerly in the pew behind him and leans forward, resting his chin on his hands near where Ronan’s elbow is propped up on the pew back.

“Parrish,” he says, not moving.

“How did you know it was me?” Adam keeps his voice to a murmur. He’s always a little afraid to speak up in this place, just in case some entity somewhere is actually listening.

“Who else do we know that ever smells like manual labor?”

“I’m sorry I’m stinking up the place.”

Ronan sighs. “That’s not what I said.”

He sounds exhausted and Adam wonders if he’s been sleeping, kicks himself mentally for not just knowing. The closer they get to the end of their quest the more there is to keep track of and he feels bad for letting the interpersonal stuff slip.

Lighter this time, he tries, “How do you know what manual labor smells like, anyway?”

“Do you think the farm ran itself?”

Adam has a hard time picturing Declan or Ronan working a cattle farm and an even harder time picturing what he knows of Niall keeping up with it, but it does exist and someone must have. He doesn’t have a hard time picturing Matthew doing anything, because Matthew is universally interested in whatever you place in front of him. Now that Adam knows he’s Ronan’s dream he can’t help but wonder how much of Matthew is what Ronan wants to be. Or used to want to be.

“What are you doing down here,” Adam asks, “if you’re not hiding your drinking from Gansey?”

“I’ve come for confession.”

“The priest isn’t here tonight. You told me that yourself.”

“Who says I was interested in confessing to him?”

“Does it count if no one hears it?” Adam is genuinely curious.

Ronan is quiet for a moment, still very still. Then he cocks his head, cracks an eye and says, “you can hear it.”

“I don’t know that I want to,” Adam says. “No offense.”

“I am sure you don’t,” Ronan says, voice dipping into his usual wryness.

There’s something in it that Adam can’t back down from. “Let’s have it, then.”

Ronan closes his eyes again. His skin is sallow in the low, yellow lighting from the outer edges of the room and the circles under his eyes make them look deeper than usual, close to death. Calmly close in a way that scares Adam more than the memory of the struggling, dying Ronan at his feet in the choir loft.

“I am having…thoughts I shouldn’t,” he says hesitantly and Adam feels a little guilty that his presence will most likely color what Ronan feels he’s allowed to say. It isn’t fair of him to horn in on this out of his own selfish need.  

“Don’t we all,” Adam agrees. Ronan shifts and knocks him in the cheek with his elbow. Adam slaps Ronan’s arm and rubs at his jaw. “Aren’t you supposed to start with ‘bless me father for I have sinned’ or something?”

“I only have one father,” Ronan says gravely. “And neither you or the priest are it.”

“True enough.” Adam leans back into his own pew and settles against the hardwood. “So, what are you thinking about?” he asks, pretending they’re having any other late night conversation.

Then the silence stretches out. Ronan sits and sits and Adam tries not to squirm as the wood bites into his back. He’s starting to feel the wear of the day himself and he lets his own eyes slip closed. He wonders briefly what will happen if the staff comes in in the morning to find their tenant and one of their flock asleep in their pews.

When Ronan speaks his voice is rough, but it’s also loud enough to make sure that Adam hears it. He only says one word. “You.”

Adam can feel his cheeks go warm. Now he’s no longer just guilty, but angry with himself. He wasn’t meant to hear this. This isn’t, he’s sure, how this was meant to happen. How Ronan would have wanted it to happen if he’d gotten the chance to gather the strength on his own. Adam feels he’s managed to force Ronan’s hand and he feels like shit for doing it.

He’s not stupid. He’s noticed Ronan’s attention, but he hasn’t had the energy to meet it or really think about what it might mean. He does know that when he considers it there’s no recoil in him, no sense of revulsion related to Ronan’s gender or sex, for whatever that’s worth. It’s just fear. Fear of what his father will think. Fear that he’ll fuck it up, that he’s not good enough for someone like Ronan Lynch.

Adam can’t bring himself to come up with a response. He tips forward and rests his forehead against Ronan’s shoulder, wanting to let Ronan know that he’s still there and not going anywhere, even if he can’t say it out loud.

“You’re supposed to say something,” Ronan says. “Give me a penance.”

Adam doesn’t know what kind of penance attraction could possibly require. It’s not as if it’s something that can be helped, though he still doesn’t understand how Ronan can be attracted to him. He’s had months to mull it over, but Ronan’s probably been sitting with it for longer, so he doesn’t second guess him.

“Why now?” he asks, words muffled in Ronan’s sweatshirt.

“I couldn’t breathe,” Ronan says. “It was starting to hurt.”

“Does spreading it around make it better?”

“I’ll let you know in the morning, I guess,” Ronan says. He sounds wistful and a bit sad and Adam begins to understand just a little about how not being able to breathe  because of another person must feel.

Adam scoots forward so that he can rest his chin on Ronan’s shoulder. He wraps his arms around Ronan’s chest and just holds onto him, not asking or promising, simply being. “Your penance is to come upstairs and do your history reading.”

“Rough,” Ronan says. “You been taking lessons from God while living under his roof, Parrish?”

“I guess you just rub off on me, Lynch,” Adam replies.

Ronan shakes a bit then under Adam’s grasp. He opens his eyes and laughs and it rings out clear in the empty spaces of the church. Adam guesses that spreading it around helped a bit after all.


	18. Things you said with too many miles between us (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112614432269/okay-you-asked-for-it-some-more-for-adam-ronan), written for [allthroughoursplendor](http://allthroughoursplendor.tumblr.com/).

DC feels different this time and Adam can’t quite put his finger on why. It used to be an escape, an undiluted shot of what he hoped to achieve in the future, a reminder of all of the things he could be and have if he worked hard enough. Now it feels less inevitable, somehow.

Helen is hovering around him in the crowd of party goers—who are thankfully younger this time, mainly in their late 30s—straightening his tie and touching him indiscriminately. Her attention still feels nice, still strokes his ego, but he doesn’t feel as desperate for it anymore. He thinks she can probably tell, because she’s been speaking to him more as a co-conspirator than as her little brother’s charity friend.

Maybe this is just what growing up is, the same old things shifted around a bit until they don’t fit neatly in their compartments anymore. That would explain why everything about the future that doesn’t have to do with Glendower stresses Gansey out. He hates it when things don’t fit.

As if called by his thoughts, Gansey taps Adam on the shoulder. “Excuse me, councilwoman,” he says, polite smile sewn into his handsome face, “but I have to take Mr. Parrish away now.”

“Oh, finally,” Helen says in an exaggerated manner. “Chatting our ears off he was, couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

Adam may never get used to the way people in DC find it acceptable to bend the truth over backwards as long as it’s done with the appropriate amount of charm. He wonders if that’s something he can learn or if it has to have been bred into him like it was with the Ganseys. Helen takes the councilwoman by the elbow as if it’s what she’s been dying to do all night and points her toward the champagne fountain. She throws a wink over her shoulder at them as she goes.

“What did you do to Helen?” Gansey asks, voice settling back into the easy tone Adam knows. “She hasn’t been this nice to someone since her last boyfriend took her swimming with sharks in Hawaii.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Adam says, but the idea of Helen wanting to surround herself with toothy beasts that might swallow a man whole makes total sense to him.

Gansey shrugs as if to say ‘how could you’ and then holds his cellphone out to Adam. “It’s for you,” he says. “You can take it out on the back terrace, there shouldn’t be too many people out there.”

Adam looks at the phone for a moment before pulling it from Gansey’s hand. He places it to his good ear as he weaves his way through the party goers, making a beeline for the French doors to the backyard. “Hi?” he says.

“Well if you’re not sure if you’d like to greet me, Parrish, I’m not sure if I want to talk to you at all.” It’s Ronan. Relief floods Adam as his body lets go of a tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying.

The terrace is as empty as he’d hoped it would be. There are a few smatterings of people standing about the yard in the golden glow of the lamps, but none of them take notice of Adam. He tucks himself into the corner of the stone railing, leaning against it on his elbows and crossing his legs.

“I didn’t know it was you, dick,” he says mildly.

“No, that’s our other friend. You’ve forgotten my name already,” Ronan replies. “I’m just going to lose you to that big city before I’ve even really had you at all, aren’t I?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Adam looks up at the moon and thinks about how some things seem very close even when you can’t touch them.

“I thought you might need a break from all that polite nonsense talk.”

“So you called to give me some not polite talk? How thoughtful.”

“I wasn’t going to go there,” Ronan says, “but I could I guess. What are you wearing?”

Adam laughs. “My suit. The one suit I own. You know the one.”

“I do. How quickly can you get out of it?”

“Don’t,” Adam says, ears starting to burn.

It’s Ronan’s turn to laugh. “Okay,” he says, “I won’t.”

Adam isn’t convinced, though, and now he’s thinking about Ronan pulling the jacket off of him, of their skin touching, of clumsy fingers and sharp teeth and he can feel the flush as it works through him.

“You still there?” Ronan asks.

“I’m here.” Adam grips the phone like it’s a lifeline and realizes then what it is that’s different this time. He’s not alone. Ronan isn’t here now, but Adam always knows he’s there anyway, waiting for him no matter where he’s got off to in physical or liminal space. It’s a focal point he’s never had before, a home that doesn’t hurt. Something inside him snaps and he’s filled with an entirely different sort of warmth. “I’m here,” he says again, and he means it this time.

“I know you are,” Ronan says gently. “I’m here too.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all.”

Adam can hear Chainsaw rattling in her cage in the background. He can hear Ronan shifting on his bed. He can hear the faint sounds of Henrietta outside of Monmouth’s windows and he’s homesick suddenly in a way he’s never known.

“I wish I could kiss you,” Adam says.

“Do you want to know what I’m wearing?”

“No. I am sure I do not.” Left alone Ronan is usually wearing as little clothing as feasible and that’s not something Adam needs to dwell on as he smiles politely at politically minded strangers who might net him jobs.

More laughter. “I’m shit at these things. I never have anything to say. I just wanted to remind you that you had to come back home after you’re finished being Cinderella. Or I’m coming up to that tower and bringing you back down myself.”

“The tower is Rapunzel,” Adam laughs. “You can’t even get which princess I am straight.”

“What is it you are so fond of saying, Parrish? That my straightness is the biggest lie I ever told?”

“Yeah well, you’re an asshole, so what do you know?”

“I know I need you,” Ronan says.

It’s careful. It’s very purposefully not ‘I love you’, but it isn’t not ‘I love you’ either. They’d both found that their pasts had made it hard for them to promise things to other people, so they didn’t, not even each other, not even when they wanted to so much it hurt. They did it other ways instead. What were words anyway? Just preludes to the more meaningful bits.

“I need you too,” Adam replies.

There’s a cough behind him and he turns around to see Helen standing with two glasses in her hands. She raises her eyebrows at him. “If your boyfriend can spare you, I need some folksy charm.”

Adam blushes. He hadn’t known Gansey had told Helen about that, but it might explain some of the new found ease in her attention. “Yeah,” he says. Then, into the phone. “I have to go.”

“Always in demand, my magician,” Ronan says. “Go on, go slay a WASP-y dragon. I’ll see you in a couple days.”

“You too,” Adam says. The line goes dead. He slips the phone into his pocket and takes the glass Helen shoves at him. A quick sniff reveals it to be ginger ale and not champagne. He takes a sip and looks up at her, thankfully.

“I’m not a total idiot, you know. I see things.” She offers him her elbow and he takes it.

The reflection of the two of them in the glass of the doors is a curious sight to Adam. It’s everything he used to think he wanted. It’s a false promise. She’s warm against him and he’s very grateful that she’s there and also grateful that there’s someone else entirely to want him elsewhere.


	19. Things you said at 1 am (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112670102364/ronan-adam-1), written for [getawaymachine](http://getawaymachine.tumblr.com/).

“Did you ever want a pony?” Adam asks. **  
**

Ronan’s lying on his stomach on Adam’s floor. He lifts his head up off his arms and hooks his chin over the edge of the mattress. “No?”

“Yeah, me either,” Adam says. He curls onto his side so that they’re facing each other. 

Ronan can barely make out Adam’s features in the dim streetlight slipping in between the blinds. He waits for a follow up, but nothing comes. “Was that question going somewhere, or should I just drop a dollar in its hat and go on with my night?”

Adam rubs at his nose with his sheet wrapped hand. “It was a thought I just had. About how on TV and stuff, kids always want a pony. I never wanted a pony. I didn’t know if that made me weird.”

“I’m sure that wasn’t what made you weird.”

“You know what I mean.”

Ronan does, but he also thinks that maybe, for Adam, it was always less about what he wanted and more about feeling like a burden. Sometimes, in his less than charitable moments, Ronan wishes for a reason to kill Robert Parrish. Or at least maim him. That son of a bitch doesn’t deserve the son he’s been given. Though, even on the nights when Ronan feels like he could own the world he doesn’t think he deserves Adam either.

Adam won’t understand if Ronan says it out loud, but there was very little he did want as a child. Not because of money, but because of his ability and the responsibility of it. From a very young age he had examined his wants carefully and discarded the ones that felt like too much. It’s a thing he finds himself incapable of doing in the presence of Adam Parrish.

“I can get you a pony,” Ronan says.

Adam laughs, quiet and tired, and Ronan wants nothing more than to reach out and brush the hair out of his face. “I’m sure you can get me a great many things, but you should probably use that power for good and not evil.”

“Can’t,” Ronan says. “There’s only evil in me. From the tips of my tattoo to the bottom of my tiny, black heart.” 

It’s probably just the hour and the hushed, precious feeling of the moment, but he feels daring. He drapes his arm up onto the mattress as well so that his fist is resting against his chin. At this rate he could be pressed next to Adam in just enough time to be kicked out when he gets up to work in the morning.

 _I’m such a coward_ , Ronan thinks. _An evil coward_.

“There’s no way you believe that.” Adam is watching him steadily and Ronan can feel it just as surely as if it was physical contact. Every part of him  _wants_.

“I don’t not believe it.”

Adam slides his hand forward. Ronan’s own hand disappears under the sheet as Adam wraps his fingers around it. “You need to stop talking shit about my friend,” he says.

The word ‘friend’ thrills through Ronan. He can remember when Gansey first brought Adam around and he can remember the first time he looked at Adam and felt a sharp pang of desire, but he can’t remember the middle point where they were more than acquaintances but less than the complete tangled mess they are now. “Or you’ll what, Parrish?”

“I don’t know, but I’ll have Cabeswater help me come up with something creative.”

“There’s no way Cabeswater is going to choose you if we break up. You may fix it up, but I’m a part of it.”

“Are you saying we have to stay together for our magical kid?” Adam yawns and Ronan can’t help but join in. “That’s never a good idea.”

Ronan doesn’t answer, doesn’t know how to. He didn’t ask for this. His life would be infinitely easier if he hadn’t fallen for this strange, boy-shaped wonder of power and intelligence. He’s come to terms with the fact that it has to be a boy, but why this boy? When did Adam become the linchpin of his life instead of Gansey? And what will happen if he fucks it up?

 _We should stay together because I don’t know what I’d do without you now, asshole_ , Ronan thinks.

He’s afraid if he opens his mouth he’ll ask for too much, that it will turn into one of his dreams. One of the ones where he tries in so many ways to tell Adam what he wants and how he feels and Adam just gazes back at him in disdain, or at worst, disgust. He wants to open his mouth so badly.

Adam squeezes Ronan’s hand and goes to pull his away but Ronan catches it between his fingers and squeezes back. He doesn’t let go.

“I don’t want you to remind me of this in the morning,” Adam says, “because I’m sure you’ll be a dick about it. Blame it on the exhaustion, but I feel like I need to tell you that you’re important to me, okay? Like, I don’t know when it happened either, so don’t ask. But it just, it hurts me when you don’t believe in you like I do.”

“Why do you think I keep you around?” Ronan says in a practiced, bored tone. “Someone needs to.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“I told you, pure evil.”

“Would my pony be evil? I might make an exception for an evil pony.”

“We could start a whole petting zoo of the damned.”

“Mmhm,” Adam mumbles. His eyes tip closed and he tilts his head on the pillow so that his chin is dipped in towards his chest. He adjusts his hand a little but doesn’t pull it away.

Ronan watches Adam until his breathing evens out and his jaw goes slack. Only then does he let himself close his own eyes. For the first time in a very long time Ronan goes to sleep already holding onto something he wants.


	20. Things you said with no space between us (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112820616544/continuing-to-fill-in-allthroughoursplendors), written for [allthroughoursplendor](http://allthroughoursplendor.tumblr.com/).

It’s hot and sticky and gross. They’d crawled under the BMW with the intention of Adam finally teaching Ronan to change his own damn oil, but now that they’re down there in the shade neither of them wants to move. Possibly ever again. At least not until September. **  
**

Ronan does a shimmy and brings his left hand up so he can cradle the back of his head. His sweat slicked right arm bumps into Adam from his elbow up to his shoulder. It’s almost more than Adam can bear. He’d probably be completely undone if it was 10° cooler.

Jesus, it’s hot.

“I hope the jack stand doesn’t fail,” Ronan says.

“Did you not want your nose pressed back into your brain by the undercarriage of your own car? Might help add some bad boy flair. Make you look dangerous.”

“I’m already dangerous. But some of us need all the help our pretty faces can get us.”

“You think I’m pretty?” Adam says, voice pitched high at the end to imitate clueless girls in clueless movies.

“I would punch you if I could move my arm.”

“Not in the face though, surely.” Adam starts laughing because he can’t help it. It’s possible his brain is starting to bake. “We should go inside. There’s cold water inside.”

“Yeah, but we’d have to get there and I’m not sure I’d survive the trip.” Ronan’s skin is already pink, has been getting steadily pinker over the last several weeks spent stomping through the woods.

“You do know sunscreen is a thing, right?” Adam asks, realizing it’s entirely possible Ronan doesn’t.

“Of course I know sunscreen is a thing,” Ronan replies with light disdain.

He shimmies again and Adam doesn’t know what he’s hoped to accomplish this time, but now their arms are flush down to where the back of Ronan’s hand is snug against the back of his. Ronan taps his pinky against Adam’s hand questioningly. Adam shifts and lets Ronan take it. Now his hand is pressed between Ronan’s skin and Ronan’s jeans and he doesn’t know when he started to want this so much, but it feels like a miracle to have achieved it finally.

“When do you think Gansey will be back?” he asks.

“I don’t know.” Ronan cants his head sideways so that he’s looking at Adam. 

Adam turns his head as well until their noses are touching. The warm gravel in the pavement bites into his cheek. “If you wanted to make out with the car I could have just left you two to it. You probably don’t need to know where the plug is for that.”

“What’s that about plugs?” Ronan kisses Adam on the mouth slow and deep. He pulls back, tugging Adam’s bottom lip lightly with his teeth and continues, “if you wanted to try the kinky shit you could just ask.”

“Kinkier than auto erotica?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s something else entirely,” Ronan says.

Adam shrugs and jostles Ronan’s arm. Ronan jostles him back and kisses him again. He shifts and then Adam can feel Ronan’s free hand creeping up under the hem of his shirt. Adam tries to scoot closer in vain. There’s not enough room for much more overlap than they already have, but the way Ronan is grasping at Adam’s stomach and tickling just below the band of his jeans is making it hard for him to not just try to roll over and crawl on top of him entirely, BMW be damned. It’s frustrating and it’s a much more pleasant heat than he’d initially been contending with.

He breaks away from the kiss gasping and Ronan passes a disappointed lick across his upper lip. “You know how we decided there was cold water upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“I think I might need some.”

“Parched, Parrish?” Ronan drawls, really leaning into the alliteration.

“Um, all over me, I mean” Adam says. “And you. And you all over me. And.”

He’s stammering now, because he doesn’t know how to ask for what he wants. They’d never negotiated any of this and it’s more than he’s ever voiced. Ronan has been so careful with him, he knows, trying not to scare him or push him too far too fast. But Adam figures there’s a time in every man’s life when he needs to be pushed. Preferably up against a wall, and then had whatever can be done to him done to him.

“Ah,” Ronan says, and he’s out from under the car like a shot.

Adam crawls out after him and Ronan’s already out of his shirt as he hits Monmouth's first floor door, using it to mop the sweat and dirt from his face. Adam covers his eyes to keep the sun out of them and follows after.

Jesus, it’s hot.


	21. Things you said when you thought I was asleep (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/112912404424/12-ronan-adam-please), written for [battlestarbean](http://battlestarbean.tumblr.com/).

Ronan doesn’t know what time it is, but he’s been stretched across Adam’s paltry mattress with his eyes closed for what feels like eons. The overhead light is still on and every couple of minutes Adam is still shuffling papers or turning pages. The tip of his pencil scratches across the surface in a low, soft way that gives Ronan a pleasant tingling in his scalp. The whole thing feels fuzzier and slightly more unreal the longer it stretches out. **  
**

Ronan is ostensibly trying to sleep, but mostly he’s waiting for Adam to give up on work for the day and then kick him to the floor where he belongs. He starts to wonder if he should get up and force Adam to bed—because God knows Adam is capable of falling asleep sitting at the shitty thrift store coffee table he’d procured, cheek pressed into the pages of his Latin text, skin creasing his paper and paper creasing his skin—but the book is finally closed and he hears Adam stand up and release the small groan he makes whenever he stretches.

The bathroom door whines open and then clicks shut again. Ronan takes the opportunity to curl up at the very edge of the mattress, leaving as much space behind him as he can in the hope that Adam will let him stay where he is. The bathroom door whines open again and Ronan holds his breath. There’s silence for more heartbeats than Ronan cares to count in which he knows Adam is just standing in the doorway, probably trying to figure out whether to wake him up or just tip him over. He prepares his mock indignation for when the ruse doesn’t work.

“Ronan?” Adam says hesitantly. Ronan doesn’t answer. He clings to the bottom sheet where it’s clinging to the corner of the mattress and waits. He’s gotten good at waiting on Adam.

Nothing happens. He hears Adam rummage around in his plastic bins and change into his pajama pants. Ronan wonders what Adam wears to bed when there’s no one there at all. He wonders if Adam ever presses into these sheets naked and alone. He wonders if the transfer might count as contact. Adam clicks off the light.

It takes Adam a few minutes more to settle into bed and Ronan spends the whole time worrying that he’s just going to take the floor instead. He tries to work out how long he should wait before it appears he’s woken up naturally in order to make it right. But then Adam is lifting the sheet and sliding beneath it. His hip grazes Ronan’s lower back and his shoulder jostles Ronan as he lays down. Ronan memorizes every small part of it—the heat and the pressure and the slide of thin fabric against skin—needs to be able to bring it to life later. He tries to convince himself that if he can do that, if this has to be all he ever takes away, then it will be okay.

Adam settles to stillness and sighs. Then he whispers, “I don’t understand what I did to deserve you.”

Adam has said this before, in broad daylight with a raised voice as Blue or Noah or Gansey tried to mediate yet another of their prideful stalemates. It feels different this time, though. It sounds different, careful, more like something he actually means.

“You’re so amazing. You have so much inherent magic and you hold it in you as if it’s nothing while I just stand next to you feeling like Cabeswater is slowly burning me away.”

Ronan’s thigh is becoming increasingly more cramped the longer he uses it for balance and it’s going to be sore in the morning, but he can’t allow himself to move. The pain is what’s keeping him grounded. This isn’t a dream. This isn’t a spell. This is actually happening and he will never forgive himself if he disturbs it. He doesn’t deserve this, but he craves it, and he’s nothing if not selfish about his wants. And God, does he want Adam Parrish to look at him, just once, like Ronan might be worthy of his attention or his emotion or his body.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Adam says. “I don’t know what I’ll do when this is over and you don’t need me anymore. Who will I be then? I’ll just go back to being nothing.”

A lump rises in Ronan’s throat and it might very well be his heart, because Adam Parrish couldn’t be inconsequential if he tried. Before all of it, before the sacrifice, when he’d just been some boy that Gansey had decided to adopt the same way he’d once adopted Ronan, Adam had been steady and quick and fierce. There is a part of Adam Parrish that Ronan knows is just waiting to be lit and transmuted into the pure, electric fire Ronan feels in his touches and glances.

“Huh. I guess your confession thing isn’t so dumb after all.” The mattress shifts and Ronan feels the sheet go tight across his shoulder, feels Adam’s back press into his own. Adam yawns and Ronan struggles not to return it and give himself away. Just as Ronan thinks that that’s it, that he’s heard all of the confession Adam could possibly have to tell, Adam says, “I wish I could make you need me the way I need you.”

It takes every bit of will Ronan has not to roll over and wrap himself around Adam and never let go.


	22. Things you said that made me feel like shit (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113048468219/another-one-of-the-adam-ronan-meme-fills-for), written for [allthroughoursplendor](http://allthroughoursplendor.tumblr.com/).

Adam has a collection of things Ronan has dreamed into existence in his apartment. There are the practical things, like cloud-soft pillows that never lose their fluffiness or crocheted blankets for cold nights or lightbulbs that he claims will never blow. Then there are the odd and wondrous things, like the bunch of blue, star-shaped flowers he keeps pressed into his Latin dictionary or the the golden penny-for-his-thoughts with his face on it or the several yards of silk material decorated with watercolor paintings of Cabeswater’s trees whose branches sway slightly if you shake it. **  
**

All of these things are precious to Adam. Precious as his own life, which he sometimes thinks might be down to Ronan as well. Adam hates the way Ronan says ‘you probably would have just let him kill you’, but he’ll never know if Ronan is right about that so it’s hard to prove him wrong either. It’s hard to explain the complicated twist at the very core of him that loves and hates his father as if they’re the same emotion, because Ronan grew up in an idyllic setting with a father he adored and was allowed to develop a concrete sense of right and wrong. It’s hard to explain a lot of things to and about Ronan.

Currently, the hardest thing to explain is the fact that he’s woken up on a Sunday morning to find his mattress and floor littered with soft downy grey feather tufts. It’s a rare day off for Adam, so he’s slept through Ronan leaving for mass and now he’s stretched out on his back on the bed holding one of the feathers up into the light cascading through the blinds and twirling it between his fingers, watching the thin, delicate hairs of it tremble.

He doesn’t realize how late it is until Ronan’s knock falls against his door and Ronan slouches in, slipping his key back into his pocket. “I was just coming back to pick all this up,” he says.

Adam sits up. The sheet falls down to his waist and a feather he hadn’t known was resting against his clavicle tickles down his bare chest and he shivers. “What were you even dreaming about? A pillow fight?”

“Yes,” Ronan says. “I was dreaming about sexy co-ed pillow fights.”

“Next time bring back one of the co-eds, okay?”

Adam’s teasing, but Ronan stiffens and his amused smirk settles into the carefully blank face he generally uses for the rest of the world. He bends down and starts picking up feathers and stuffing them into his fist to keep a hold on them. “If you must know,” he tells the ancient, cracking tile. “I was flying.”

“Like Superman or like an angel?” Adam is overwhelmed by the mental image of Ronan with powerful grey wings that would let him see the world the way Chainsaw sees it. It’s not iconography that Adam, who was raised without any church influence at all, has a connection to, but it’s powerful nonetheless.

Ronan looks up at him, frowning. “Like Superman.”

“Ah,” Adam says. “Glad it was a bird and not a plane then. I’d hate to be Donnie Darko’d before my time.”

“Next time I’ll dream you a psycho killer rabbit,” Ronan says. “Just to keep things interesting.” He plucks the feather from Adam’s hand and starts picking at the sheets around him.

The tips of Ronan’s fingers are lightly pressing into Adam’s thighs and legs as he goes about his collecting and Adam is very aware that there is little between those hands and his skin. Just a faded blue sheet and pair of boxer shorts and his suffocating sense of curiosity about what every part of Ronan feels like.

He bats Ronan’s hand away from his knee. “I can get them,” he says.

“Sorry,” Ronan mumbles. He moves away and squats at the end of the mattress to pull more from the floor.

Adam feels like he’s done nothing but kick Ronan since he came in and he doesn’t know why. He picks at the feathers in his sheets and tucks one behind his bad ear. It tickles the lobe, which is an interesting sensation compounded with the layers of cotton he usually feels like are pressed into it.

“You know I don’t care, right?” Adam says, meaning that he doesn’t care that Ronan has steadily been junking up his apartment with stuff because he can’t sleep in his own damn bed.

“Yeah, Parrish,” Ronan says, keeping his eyes on the floor. “I know you don’t care.”

Adam feels like what Ronan heard and what he’d wanted him to hear were very different things. It’s not a novel occurrence, but it’s frustrating every time like it’s the first time. “What is your deal? Did you and Declan fight?”

“My deal is that what I do with my brother is none of your business,” Ronan snaps. “I’ll just finish and get out of your hair.” He cups his hands and holds them toward Adam so he can dump his feathers in with the rest. As Adam does their fingers brush and Ronan flinches away, causing some of the feathers to land back around Adam’s ankles. Ronan looks at them and then up at Adam. “You gonna get those or do you want me to leave them.”

“Leave them,” Adam says. “Leave all of it.”

He’s just woken up but he suddenly feels exhausted all over again. He wipes his face with his hand and tries to think about what Gansey would do in this situation. He’d probably just shut the hell up and wait for Ronan to come back around, but Adam is nothing if not just as stubborn as Ronan Lynch with just as much slight collecting pride.

Ronan stands up and then opens his hands, letting the feathers rain down onto the sheets. He wipes his palms together and turns on his heel and is out the door before Adam can register what’s happening. Adam clambers out of bed, taking the sheet with him to wrap around his torso so that he’s not standing mostly naked in a church office corridor.

He gets to his threshold and shouts, “Ronan! Come back!”

The downstairs door slams and Adam thinks he’s probably too late, but then Ronan comes shuffling up the steps. He stands on the one second from the top and keeps his distance.

“What?”

“That’s what I want to know,” Adam says.

“As if you don’t know.”

Adam spreads his hands in front of him, using the empty air to indicate all of the nothing that he knows. “Just because I can read Cabeswater’s mind doesn’t mean I can read yours.”

“Then why are you taunting me?” Ronan’s voice is strangled and there’s a strained, unfamiliar set to his jaw.

“I’m not,” Adam says. “I really don’t mind that you leave all this stuff here. It’s nice to have around, as a reminder that magic is good sometimes too.”

“You don’t care about the dream things?”

“Right. Well, no. That’s not quite right. I care about them a lot. They’re not a burden.”

“Not a burden like I am?” Ronan asks.

Everything Adam knows about Ronan Lynch comes crashing down around him, because his handsome fearless friend is standing before him now and he looks utterly terrified. “What?” he says. “Why would you think that?”

“Nothing,” Ronan says. “Nevermind.”

“I will mind, thank you very much. I will mind a fuck ton.”

“It just seemed so obvious. That you knew about me. I thought–”

“You thought what?”

“I thought that you’d decided you weren’t okay with it.”

“With  _what_?” Adam asks, and he really is losing his patience with this race loop of a conversation. Why must everything be so hard all of the time? Hadn’t they earned a few easy things, what with all of the death and murderous Latin teachers and crazy fucking magical caves? Adam believes that they have. He believes they’ve earned easy for the rest of their lives and he makes a note to talk to Glendower about that the moment they find him.

“I’m. Boys.” Ronan says haltingly. A deep red flush splotches its way up his neck and over his cheeks, standing out against the orange light coming through the simple stained glass windows where it falls over his skin.

 _I’m, boys_ , is hardly a thought let alone an explanation and Adam peers at Ronan for a bit trying to decipher it. When it hits him it hits him hard and leans against the door jamb, pulling the sheet tighter around his shoulders.

“Oh,” Adam says. “Why do you think I’d care about that?”

“Because I see you like this all of the time.” Ronan flaps his hand up and down, indicating Adam’s state of undress.

“So?” says Adam. “I also see you like this all of the time.”

“Yeah, but,” Ronan begins.

“But what?” Adam says. He lifts his chin and holds Ronan’s eye contact, daring him to blink first. To Adam’s immense surprise, Ronan looks away. “Jesus Christ, just come back inside.”

“Do we really have to invite him too?” Ronan asks, raising an eyebrow.

“I guess it is his home. But maybe he’ll be considerate, go sit at a Starbucks or something for a while and give us some space.”

Ronan climbs slowly onto the main landing and approaches Adam’s door. Adam backs up to let him through and once he has it shut again he lets the sheet drop to the floor. Ronan keeps his eyes trained over Adam’s left shoulder, balling his fingers into fists and stretching them out again. Adam takes a step toward Ronan and Ronan leans away slightly.

“Look at me,” Adam says.

“I am looking at you.”

“No,  _look at me_.” He grabs Ronan’s jaw with his fingers and turns his face until Ronan is looking at him sidelong. Having eye contact again feels like a small victory. “Look at me,” he says again, softly this time.

Ronan reaches up and grasps Adam’s hand in his and pulls it away from his face. “I am looking at you,” he says again, also more softly.

“I apologize in advance if I’m wrong about this,” Adam says, and then leans in and gingerly presses his lips to Ronan’s.

Ronan stands stiffly against his touch and doesn’t kiss him back. When Adam pulls away Ronan’s eyes are open wide. Adam nods to himself and steps back. He starts to stutter out an 'I'm sorry', but Ronan catches his hip with his hand and draws him close again. This time when their lips meet Ronan is pliable and hungry. He runs a hand down Adam’s chest and a shiver shoots through Adam the same as it had when it was merely a feather dancing across his skin. Adam rests his hands on Ronan’s waist and draws him even closer until they’re flush together.

The whole thing is awkward and amazing and only lasts for several seconds, but it feels like it’s lasted for hours. With his eyes closed Adam can see streaks of light across the backs of his eyelids and he thinks about all those cartoon characters he watched as a kid who constantly had anvils dropped on them and stars dancing around their heads. He thinks he knows how that feels now.

Ronan pulls back and he studies Adam, face still full of confusion, but at least somewhat pleasantly so it seems.

“So,” Adam says. “About those co-eds.”

“Jesus, Mary fucking Joseph,” Ronan says. “Shut up.”

Adam leans in to kiss him again. 


	23. Things you said under the stars and in the grass (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113226905489/can-you-write-a-fic-about-adam-being-jealous-bc), written for [pizza-for-fandom](http://pizza-for-fandom.tumblr.com/).

School’s only been out for a week and Adam’s already restless. It’s not that he has nothing to do. He still has two jobs. It’s just that without the added concentration needed for schoolwork his mind is drifting. The trailer factory doesn’t use up any mental capacity at all and there are very few problems they’ll give to a novice mechanic at the shop that would actually require any creativity to solve. So he works and he thinks and he tries not to think, because he’s learning that an idle mind is almost as dangerous as idle hands. Especially if either are going to fall on a devil like Kavinsky.

Adam doesn’t have any interest in Kavinsky himself, but he has interest in Ronan’s interest in Kavinsky and the way it’s been steadily growing. Not because it matters to him who Ronan spends time with, but because it’ll be a pain in the ass for all of them if Ronan ends up arrested for street racing or being anywhere near such a large amount of drugs. And then there’s the possibility that Ronan could hurt himself. Adam doesn’t know the crash rating on the BMW, but he’s pretty sure wrapping it around a pole or another car at over a hundred miles per hour will not be pretty.

Adam doesn’t let himself think about this second reason very often. It twists something deep within him and he can’t breathe when it happens.

So he’s restless and he’s anxious and he’s off for the night. He goes downstairs to the church office and uses the phone to call Ronan.

“Heyo!” There’s music playing behind Ronan in the background. Something loud and noxious pouring from a subwoofer. Adam can hear the plastic of whatever car it’s coming from shaking around it as the bass falls out.

“Uh, hey,” Adam says.

“What’s up?”

Ronan’s shouting a bit, so Adam raises his voice when he answers. “Nothing. Just wanted to see if you wanted to hang out. But if you’re busy I can—”

“No,” Ronan says. “I can come. You at the church?” 

There’s shouting behind him and then Adam hears Kavinsky, as clearly as if he’s taken the phone from Ronan. “Not leaving already are you, lover?” Kavinsky’s mouth must be so close to Ronan’s ear for him to be that clear. Adam thinks about Kavinsky draping an arm over Ronan’s shoulders and pressing close. His stomach turns over.

“Fuck off,” Ronan says. There are sounds like a small scuffle and Ronan sounds farther away when he says, “we can race any night, man. No, I don’t want any of your fucking drugs for the road.” The music becomes quieter and Adam guesses Ronan is walking away. “So,” Ronan says directly into the receiver again. “The church?”

“Yes,” Adam says.

“I’ll be right there.” Ronan hangs up.

Adam feels a swell of pride that he was able to lure Ronan away from the bright flash of cars and alcohol and whatever else it is that happens when those idiots get together. He’s sitting on the front steps to the sanctuary when Ronan pulls up and Adam doesn’t wait for him to get out of the car before he throws himself into the passenger seat and slams the door.

“Uh, hey,” Ronan says.

“I just want to go somewhere. I’m sick of staring at the water spots on the ceiling.”

“Somewhere it is, then.” Ronan puts the car in reverse and they’re off.

He drives them out onto the highway and to where the gas stations get farther apart and the treeline slips into darkness with no towns to highlight it against the deep purple of the sky. Adam’s managed to pull Ronan away from trouble, but he hasn’t managed to pull the trouble out of Ronan. He’s shifting hard and changing lanes more recklessly than usual, which is really saying something.

The music is off, but the windows are down, so it’s hard to hear anything over the night wind as it whips through the BMW’s cabin and tousles Adam’s hair. “Why do you hang out with them?” he shouts.

“You’re not my mother, Parrish,” Ronan warns.

Adam knows Ronan hears enough protests about his recklessness from Gansey and that he and Ronan don’t have the kind of relationship that would stand the test of his judgment. Adam also isn’t Ronan’s mother, but he definitely cares about him enough to be something, something he can’t quite put his finger on and definitely wouldn’t voice if he could, because they don’t have that kind of relationship either. He cares enough to be worth more than Kavinsky’s gang of assholes. Ronan had left them to come to him the minute he called, but it doesn’t feel like his heart is in it and that makes Adam even more anxious.

“I just don’t understand the appeal, I guess,” he says. “It’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous as life,” Ronan says, subverting Gansey’s favorite saying, and it’s actually a tidy way to sum the two of them up. Adam sits in silence as Ronan passes a tractor trailer. “Hang on,” he says.

Adam almost doesn’t have time to grab onto the ‘oh shit’ handle above the passenger side window before Ronan swerves around the truck at top speed and skitters off onto an exit. He slows to about 60 to take the turn onto a two lane street and blows through two red lights before taking a sharp right onto a dirt road. The BMW’s suspension creaks as the bumps in the dirt work to rattle Adam’s teeth out of his skull. There’s a corner coming up and Adam is sure they’re not going to make it. Just as they hit it Ronan throws the hand brake and jerks the steering wheel.

The car slides around on itself and Adam feels it as if it’s happening in slow motion. They spin and throw up a tail of dust that obscures his view. The car finally comes to a stop against a steep dirt embankment on the side of the road and the sand and dust hanging in the air rains down onto the windshield sounding like a simmering pan. Adam is shaking all over and he can’t feel his legs.

“Huh,” Ronan says, peering at him. “I really thought you would make a noise.”

Adam looks at Ronan and then at the headlights casting onto the trees five feet from them and then down at his hands, willing them to work. He unbuckles his seatbelt and gets out of the car. He doesn’t make it far before he has to stop and succumb to the shaking, dropping down into the grass and arching his back into one of the trees. He runs both of his hands through his hair.

Ronan throws on the hazards, gets out, and follows him. He doesn’t sit, choosing instead to stand over Adam and gaze down. “It wasn’t that bad,” he says.

“Do you have a death wish?” Adam shouts. His heart is beating twenty times for every orange flash of the blinkers. He reaches out and strikes at Ronan’s shins with his fists. The blows don’t land hard, but he doesn’t want to hurt Ronan anymore than he wants Ronan to hurt himself. “What the hell, man!”

Ronan raises an eyebrow and crosses his arms. “I know what I’m doing,” he says.

“I highly doubt that,” Adam mumbles.

Ronan drops to a knee and leans forward to meet Adam eye to eye. “Do you have something you want to say to me, Parrish? Because I can go back to the good time I was having. Kavinsky’s a shithead, but at least he doesn’t judge people for enjoying themselves.”

Adam doesn’t think that’s true, but he’s in no place to argue. It’s Ronan who spends time with Kavinsky. Ronan who’s drawn to him like an ill-advised firefly looking to make himself brighter by mingling with a forest fire. There’s a small voice in the back of Adam’s head that thinks,  _no one will ever be drawn to me that way_ , and finally he understands. He’s ashamed of himself.

“Really, what is it?” he says, trying to be less defensive.

Ronan sighs and drops onto the edge of the grassline next to him. “You can’t feel that?”

“I can feel my heart trying to escape my chest. It’s a terrible feeling.”

“It’s the best feeling,” Ronan says with careful awe.

Adam studies Ronan, really looks at him for the first time in months. His pale skin is glowing in the headlights. They’ve been through a lot during the school year, much more than most people should have to deal with. Much more than most people would even believe could happen. At some point during their acquaintanceship Ronan has actually become his friend. The kind of friend who will change his plans last minute to come hang out with someone with no money and no plan of his own. That must count for something, surely.

Adam feels like an idiot for being jealous of Kavinsky of all people. He feels even more like an idiot for not realizing it until his life was in certain danger. But maybe that’s what Ronan means. Maybe this adrenaline gives him clarity. It only makes Adam want to vomit.

“So it’s not death you’re after then,” he says, forcing a small laugh out at the end to let Ronan know it’s just a joke now, not judgment.

“Not tonight,” Ronan says. He leans back and braces himself on his hands. Adam follows his line of sight up through the trees to the stars beyond them. “It’s not a good night for that sort of thing.”

“There’s never a good night for that sort of thing,” Adam says.

“You’d be surprised.”

Adam doesn’t think he would. He’s only ever clung to his life in spite of spending so much of it in fear, but he doesn’t argue. If he wants to be someone who cares about Ronan enough to be worth more than a Kavinsky then he needs to respect his thoughts. Most of them. The skid with no warning was still a stupid idea.

“I don’t like how we got here,” he says, “but it’s nice to be here.”

“You sound like Gansey.”

“It’s hard not to when you’re dealing with a stupid friend. How did he ever manage you alone before me?”

Ronan chuckles at that and Adam’s heart slows just a bit. “No one manages me like you, Parrish.”

Adam breaks his eyes away from the sky and looks at Ronan again. Ronan’s neck is tilted back, head hanging heavily against his hunched shoulders, and his eyes are bright. They’re so bright they might as well be reflecting the sky. His chest is rising and falling steadily and there’s a curve at the corner of his mouth that Adam has so rarely seen, because it’s not sardonic. It might very well be actual happiness. Adam reaches behind him past the tree trunk and places his hand on top of Ronan’s.

Ronan doesn’t look away from the sky, but he delicately slips two of his fingers out from under Adam’s and drapes them over top of his so that their hands are carelessly tangled together. Adam feels like he might finally know what Ronan spends so much time looking for in the night breeze at a hundred miles an hour. He infinitely prefers his way of finding it.


	24. Things you said too quietly (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113315304729/still-chipping-away-at-the-adam-ronan-requests-for), written for [allthroughoursplendor](http://allthroughoursplendor.tumblr.com/).

Ronan and Blue have been perched on opposite arms of the couch talking about Colin Firth for fifteen minutes. Noah is sitting between them, excitedly joining in when he can because it’s an actor he actually remembers from when he was alive. Adam finds their infatuation a bit ridiculous, but in a mostly charming way. Yeah, those fight scenes were really awesome, but Colin Firth is a little old for either of them. Still, he can’t seem to help it that his eyes keep straying away from the game of pool he’s playing with Gansey to watch Ronan talk.

He hasn’t sat them down and come out or anything, but Ronan had started making small comments here and there and when none of them balked he made more until one day it was like at least twenty-five percent of the tenseness he always carried in him evaporated. It makes Adam truly happy to finally see Ronan at ease with a piece of himself. Adam feels lucky to have been witness to some part of his becoming, because he knows that in the end Ronan is going to be the most powerful of all of them and it will be warming just to have ever known him.

Ronan catches Adam’s eye and says, “You have an opinion, Parrish?”

Adam considers what he’s thinking of saying very carefully, because he has an inkling of what he might want, but he doesn’t know he’s sure and he’s afraid of fucking things up. He leans against the pool table and says, “I think he’s kind of old.” Blue opens her mouth to protest, but Adam looks Ronan dead in the eye and continues, “that Eggsy kid was cool though, right?”

Ronan raises an eyebrow and steadily holds Adam’s gaze. “Yes,” he says slowly, “I think he was.”

Adam is stuck now, unable to back down or look away for fear he’ll lose, even though he doesn’t know what game he’s really playing. Gansey pokes him in the ribs with his pool cue and he almost topples over. Blue snorts.

“Those stripes aren’t going to sink themselves,” Gansey says.

“Adam probably isn’t going to sink them either,” Noah says, and then laughs at himself.

Adam laughs too and shakes his head as he leans over to take his shot. It’s hard to be angry at a dead kid, but sometimes Noah really asks for it. He does manage to sink a ball that turn. One of his own, even.

Ten-thirty turns into eleven turns into eleven-thirty turns into midnight. Blue and Noah are both curled up at the foot of Gansey’s bed talking quietly to each other. Gansey is sitting at his desk, having gone off to answer some question he’d come up with half an hour ago and then gotten caught in his neverending stack of books. Adam is on the couch with Ronan, watching yet another Colin Firth movie on Gansey’s laptop. Blue had started it, but then wandered off and left the two of them there with their knees touching while Mr. Firth danced to oldies music in an impeccable suit and cried over Matthew Goode.

The movie ends and it leaves Adam feeling heavy. He stands up to stretch. “I think I should probably go.”

“Night!” Gansey calls without turning around.

Blue looks at Adam and rolls her eyes. “Night,” she and Noah say in unison.

Adam slips into Ronan’s room to retrieve his jacket where he’d draped it across the bed and when he comes out Ronan is in his tennis shoes and standing by the door.

“I’ll walk you down?” he asks.

“Sure,” Adam says.

He doesn’t know why it’s a question. Ronan hasn’t ever walked him out before, but it’s not something Adam disagrees to in general. Ronan opens the door and Adam slips past him. As Ronan’s closing it again Adam’s sure he hears Ronan say something, but when the turns to look Ronan is just standing behind him on the chilly landing with his hands in his pockets. Adam starts down the steps and Ronan follows.

The Monmouth parking lot is lit in pale orange light from the few remaining scattered streetlamps. A gust of cold wind whips past them and Ronan wraps his arms around himself, his t-shirt just not cutting it. “You can go back up,” Adam says. “I’m sure I’ll make it to my car fine.”

Ronan  _looks_  at him and walks around him towards the Hondayota. Adam follows. When they get there Adam puts his key in the door, but doesn’t open it. Ronan stands five feet away from him not saying anything. He tilts his head back and looks up at the sky. Adam let’s his gaze follow. There’s enough light pollution in this part of Henrietta that the stars aren’t the dazzling diamond blanket Adam always finds comfort in, but there are enough of them to keep his eyes occupied while his brain frantically tries to work out what is happening.

Maybe nothing is happening. Maybe Ronan really does just want to come and stand outside for a while and needs an excuse. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d used Adam as an excuse for something Gansey would question. But then again, maybe something is happening. Adam’s stomach clenches and he tries to figure out what he should do. Does he want Ronan to make a move on him? It might make his decision easier. But what if Ronan does and Adam finds out it’s not what he wants after all? Will they be okay after that? There’s a five second period where Adam considers making the first move himself. It causes his brain to lock up entirely.

Ronan speaks and Adam’s sure he hears it this time, but since Ronan’s standing on his bad side he can’t make out any words, just the warm tone of his voice.

“What?” Adam asks. He turns toward the car a little to position himself better for hearing.

Ronan looks from the sky to Adam’s face and then to his feet. “I like you,” he says.

It’s loud enough for Adam to hear this time. He thinks that maybe Ronan just needed to practice a few times. Adam checks in with his gut real quick and finds that everything is the same as it had been a few minutes ago. The world hasn’t flipped. He hasn’t suddenly begun to find Ronan repulsive or irresistible. He’s still just Ronan, standing in the cold and shivering, kicking his feet in the loose bits of pavement.

When Adam doesn’t answer he takes a step back, eyes still trained on the ground and says, “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re an idiot,” Adam says, finding his voice finally. “Of course it matters.”

“No, I won’t do anything weird or anything. It won’t change us, okay?”

“Too late. It’s already changed us.”

Ronan looks up at him and Adam is struck by the sheer uncertainty hanging about his brow and mouth. It’s not a look that sits well on Ronan, because Ronan is the most assured person Adam knows. Even when he’s denying parts of himself he’s doing it so fiercely that it almost makes the perceived him a reality. Almost.

Adam clears his throat. “I think I like you too.”

“You think?” Ronan says, cautiously.

“I’ve uh, never done this before.”

Ronan laughs. “Yeah, me either.”

“But I also feel different?”

“That sounds promising.”

“I think it is.” Adam plays with the keys where they’re still hanging in the door of his car. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” Ronan says.

“Okay.”

Adam steps forward and wraps his arms around Ronan’s waist. Ronan tenses for a second, but then he recovers and envelops Adam in a return hug. Adam rests his head against Ronan’s shoulder and Ronan tucks his chin over Adam’s forehead. They stand like that, outside of time, until Ronan is shivering so badly it’s starting to make Adam shake.  

“Go inside, idiot,” Adam says, squeezing him tighter.

Ronan pulls away reluctantly. “I don’t want to.” It’s almost a whisper and the wind almost steals it before Adam can understand what he’s said.

“There will be tomorrow, okay?” Adam says. “And the day after that at the very least.”

“But not the day after?” Ronan muses.

“I don’t know, you might do something to piss me off by then. But I think we can pencil in next Thursday regardless.”

“You’re a jerk,” Ronan says. He’s smiling, settled into himself again.

Adam doesn’t want to leave. “Thanks, I’ve been studying under the master.”

“Get on, Parrish.” Ronan takes another step back.

Adam opens the door. “I’m going, I’m going. Geez, why didn’t you just say something if you didn’t want me around?”

“I have,” Ronan says. He turns to head back to the warmth of the inside. “Three times now.” 


	25. Things you said that I wish you hadn’t (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/113315304729/still-chipping-away-at-the-adam-ronan-requests-for), written for [allthroughoursplendor](http://allthroughoursplendor.tumblr.com/). (This one follows directly after the last one.)

It had been five days since Ronan had confessed to Adam that he liked him in the parking lot of Monmouth and they’d barely had any time alone since. Mostly the odd car ride from one place to another or time spent loitering in rooms when others had left them. Just long enough to run a hand down the length of an arm and linger at the fingers or stare at each other and think really hard about leaning in but not quite get up the courage to do it. It was a strange sort of limbo they’d found themselves in. Both wanting and anticipating so much, but both being worried about spooking the other for a myriad of reasons, none of which lined up.

At lunch Adam got up to go to the bathroom, which was almost as uneventful as any other time he’d ever gone to the bathroom at school except that Ronan came in as he was drying his hands. Ronan took a quick look around to make sure they were alone and then, with the hand dryer still blasting white noise off the beige tiles, leaned in close enough for his chest to press into Adam’s shoulder and whispered, “I would really like to kiss you, Parrish.”

Adam felt himself go hot all over immediately. Ronan didn’t wait for him to answer. He merely walked over to one of the urinals and unzipped his pants and Adam shot out of the bathroom like a potato from a PVC canon.

He met back up with Gansey outside of the lunchroom after the bell. Gansey took one look at him and said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Adam said, swallowing hard. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Gansey tilted his head a little, but didn’t get too far into his study because Ronan reappeared a careful distance from Adam’s elbow and said, “Are we going to class? Because if we’re skipping we should do it now.”

Gansey frowned. “Of course we’re not skipping. Not after all of the work it took us to get you through last year. You have four more months. Just make it that long.”

“Guess that means we should get on then,” Ronan said. He reached up to grab the strap of his messenger bag and started off ahead of them. Gansey spared one last look at Adam before shrugging and turning to head after. Adam followed feeling bewildered and like he’d definitely confessed to liking a jerk who always said the worst possible thing.

There were three periods after lunch and Adam shared two of them with Ronan. During the first of them Ronan sat behind him, which was minimally distracting, because that way Adam didn’t have to watch Ronan mindfully hold himself away from Adam as he was apparently determined to do for the rest of the day. They hadn’t so much as accidentally brushed since the bathroom and Adam couldn’t decide which was worse. That is, until he got to their last class of the day where he and Ronan sat side by side and Adam had to spend the whole class watching Ronan not look at him out of the corner of his eye.

It was such a foreign thing to him now, a Ronan Lynch that didn’t constantly stare at him or touch him or ask to borrow his pens and his notes and his erasers. There had been a point in the early stages of their friendship where Ronan had been carefully cold and cordial, but once Adam had been swept up in Gansey’s quest Ronan had just accepted him and started treating him the same way he treated Gansey, which included lots of tiny touches and shared looks. At first Adam had been so wrapped up in finally being on the inside of something that he didn’t notice how much Ronan needed to ground himself against other people. By the time he worked it out he was used to it. Now he just felt tetherless without it, even though Ronan was right there, close enough to kick and diligently pretending to be interested in Economics.

Once the final bell rang they managed to make it to both of their lockers and out to the parking lot without so much as being jostled into one another, which was a feat in rowdy end of the day hallways. Out in the parking lot Ronan hitched his sweater over his head and swapped it out for his leather jacket from the back of the Pig. He closed the door without getting in and leaned through the window.

“I’m gonna go with Parrish,” he said.

“How are you getting home?” Gansey asked.

“He can drop me off on his way to work.”

Adam did not point out that Monmouth was nowhere near the garage and that such a stupid plan would really cut into any time Ronan wanted to have together. Gansey looked past Ronan to him and Adam shrugged.

“Alright then,” Gansey said. “See ya later.” He started the Pig up and the loping engine stuttered for a few seconds before finally warming and he waved at them as he pulled away from his spot and out of the parking lot.

Ronan had unbuttoned his uniform shirt and Adam could see the tint of his skin beneath the thin white t-shirt he was wearing under it. He thought about telling Ronan he hated him. Instead, Adam hitched his chin toward where the Hondayota was parked and Ronan followed him across the parking lot. Once they got in Ronan dug the mix tape out of the backseat where Adam tossed it every time Ronan got out of his car. Well, almost every time.

“It’s like you don’t appreciate my gifts,” Ronan said.

“Oh, I appreciate them alright,” Adam said, looking at the smooth pink-tinged backs of his hands as he put the car in gear and pulled out onto the main road.

Ronan rolled down his window, letting the cold wind in, and sang along with his dreadful music to the whole of Henrietta as they made their way back to the church. Adam was thankful for the racket, because it almost took his mind off how Ronan was not lightly tracing the inside of his wrist as he changed gears the way he had just yesterday.

Once back at the church Adam half expected Ronan to press him against the door once he had it closed, but he did nothing of the sort. Instead he walked over to the stack of his father’s journals he’d brought back from the Barns and picked one out at random before plopping crosslegged onto the middle of Adam’s mattress and starting to read.

“I uh, need to change for work,” Adam said.

“Okay,” Ronan replied, not looking up.

Adam didn’t mean to make the weird, strangled noise that slipped from his throat just then, but it made him feel a little better to see Ronan’s mouth quirk up at the sound of it. Ronan turned the page. Adam pulled off his sweater and unbuttoned his uniform shirt and slipped out of it. Ronan turned another page. Adam kicked off his shoes and undid his belt so he could step out of his khakis. Ronan turned another page. Adam collected a much abused pair of jeans, an old grey sweatshirt, and his dirty coveralls from the floor. Ronan turned another page. Adam did not put any of these things on. Ronan turned another page.

He glanced at his alarm clock and did some quick math. If he really did have to drive Ronan back to Monmouth they had thirty minutes, which was more concentrated alone time they’d had since Saturday. Surely that would be enough time for him to pluck up some sort of courage, drawn now as he felt by the spell that was a lack of Ronan’s touch. Adam placed his collection of clothing on the floor at the foot of his mattress and then crawled onto it, kneeling next to Ronan in his t-shirt, boxers, and socks. Ronan turned another page.

Adam reached out and gently pulled the book from Ronan’s hands. He closed it and set it on top of his pile of clothes.

“I was reading that,” he said.

“You were,” Adam replied.

“Is there something else you’d like me to do?” Ronan slowly took in all of Adam as he spoke, from his eyes down to where his hands were clasped over his thighs and damnit if Adam couldn’t almost feel him looking.

Adam cleared his throat. “I did have a few ideas,” he said. “One request in particular that you made earlier.”

“Okay then,” Ronan said, voice pitched slightly lower and rougher than it had been. Adam could feel it seeping into his pores. Ronan pulled his jacket off and tossed it over Adam’s pillow. Then he leaned back on his hands and made eye contact with him again.

“You’re supposed to be leaning the other way,” Adam said.

“Am I?” Ronan shifted until his hand was planted centimeters from Adam’s knee and their faces were about the same distance apart. “You’re pushy, Parrish,” he said, as if he really enjoyed it.

“Adam,” Adam said.

“What?” Ronan blinked.

“If you’re going to kiss me you have to call me by my first name.”

“Adam,” Ronan said. He brought a hand up and rested it on Adam’s shoulder and then pressed up onto his knees so that he was leaning over Adam. Adam shivered. Mostly from the cold, but also from finally being touched again. Ronan looked down at him for several hesitant breaths and Adam couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed up and pressed his lips to Ronan’s.

They were both on their knees in the middle of the mattress and their hands were everywhere. Adam ran one up over Ronan’s close shaved head like he’d wanted to forever and slipped another between his button up shirt and his t-shirt, greedily taking in the warmth of him as he ran it down his side and to the waistband of Ronan’s chinos. Ronan wrapped his arm entirely around Adam’s shoulder and was holding him close while his other hand slipped up under Adam’s t-shirt.

Adam jolted a bit at the feeling of Ronan’s cold fingers and knocked them both off balance. Because Ronan was the one holding on tightest Adam was pulled with him when he sat down and Adam found himself straddling Ronan’s knees. He crawled closer until he was sitting on Ronan’s thighs and Ronan let out a low growl that Adam had never heard him make before and dragged him even closer until they were flush at the chest. Adam was sure it was still dismally cold in his apartment, but he was so hot and he felt a little lightheaded. He would consider calling in sick because of it, but he still had rent to pay, even if his boyfriend did have bad timing.

And  _oh_ , Adam had never thought the word boyfriend before. He considered it as best he could as Ronan’s mouth moved from his lips to his neck and found that it worked for him. He thought about Saturday night and how he’d been concerned he might have to hurt Ronan’s feelings. It was good to have one worry out of the way at least.

His eye caught the time on his alarm clock. “Fuck."

“Time to go?” Ronan said into his shoulder. The vibration of his voice was incredibly pleasant.

“Yeah. Maybe even after.”

“How long do we have if you don’t have to drive me back?”

“Don’t be stupid, what will you do?”

Ronan answered by tangling both arms up in Adam’s t-shirt and licking a line from his jaw to his collar bone.

“Jesus,” Adam sighed. “Fifteen minutes?”

“Excellent,” Ronan said. “I’ll drop you off and come pick you up when you’re done.”

“We have school tomorrow,” Adam said.

“And all of tonight to worry about it.” When Ronan pulled back his eyelids were low, there were definite pink splotches working their way up from his neck to his cheeks, and his lips were red and wet.

“Fuck,” Adam said again.

“Slow down, Parrish,” Ronan said lazily. “You don’t want me to think you only want me for my body.”

“Adam,” Adam said.

“Adam,” Ronan replied, and kissed him again.


	26. Things you didn’t say at all (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/114111811754/prompt-meme-fill-6-of-7-for-allthroughoursplendor), written for [allthroughoursplendor](http://allthroughoursplendor.tumblr.com/).

Ronan can see the scene in panoramic view as if he’s outside of it. Him, pale and in a white t-shirt and his chinos from school, barefoot, standing out against the edge of his dream forest as the shadow stained bark and fluttering leaves of his trees rise up behind him like a protective cage. Adam, in a black t-shirt and dark jeans, also barefoot, aggressively marking the flat, empty grey landscape past the edge of the forest. They’re opposing knights on the board, maybe fifty feet apart. Ronan tenses, ready, because this is where he always loses. This is where Ronan presents Adam with his heart and Adam plucks it out of his hands and then turns away, taking it with him. **  
**

It’s happened over and over again, but never here. Usually they’re somewhere familiar. They’re in the sanctuary of St. Agnes. They’re outside of Adam’s father’s shitty trailer home. They’re in the parking lot of Monmouth. They’re always in a place that Ronan will remember later. A place he’ll have to inhabit in the usual course of his day. A place that will begin to hurt now, as he thinks about the way his whole body aches with want and impotent desire. It’s quite cunning of his subconscious really, to shrink his world around him like a noose in such a manner. Here it feels more neutral. Here he has hope on his side. He doesn’t trust it.

There’s a crunch of brush behind him and then the little girl is standing to his right. She’s wearing all black, blending in with the forest, skull cap pulled low on her brow. “You don’t have to be afraid,” she says in her trunk hollow voice. “Try again.”

Ronan doesn’t look at her. He can’t take his eyes off of Adam. Adam who looks tired and sullen, drawn into himself in a way he never lets anyone see. Not anyone but Ronan, who is constantly and purposefully getting in Adam’s way, hardly letting him have any time to himself, forcing him to show Ronan what lies beneath his carefully constructed character. _Selfish_ , he thinks.  _Kind_ , the trees whisper.  _Keeping him from being alone_.

“No,” Ronan says. They’re his trees, they’re obligated to tell him what he wants to hear, right? “If I was kind I’d give up on this. I’d let him be. He doesn’t need me there. He doesn’t want me.”

“You don’t know that,” the little girl says.

“If I was wrong it would be different.” If he was wrong he’d be on the mattress right now back in the real world, draped along Adam’s back like they were sharing skin, instead of carelessly sprawled across Adam’s hard as tack floor draped in a thin sheet with his cheek on his fists. “If I was wrong he would notice.”

“He has noticed,” she says. “He’s fixing it.”

“The ley line, yes,” Ronan says, frustrated that all of these conversations work in circles. Dream logic. “He’s fixing it, I know. You love him for it.”

 _No_ , the trees say.  _Cabeswater has him. Cabeswater desires the greywaren_.

Ronan breaks his eyes away finally from Adam’s mute reflection. He looks down at the little girl. “What? You have me. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Cabeswater loves you,” she says. “He’s fixing it.”

“That’s not what I want!”

There’s thunder from somewhere behind Adam, though no new clouds have rolled in. Ronan doesn’t know how to explain it, not even to himself. It is what he wants. It’s all he wants. It’s almost physically painful how much he wants Adam to notice him and touch him and want him, but not like this. Ronan doesn’t want a doll. He doesn’t want to impose his will. He wants Adam’s desire to be given freely or he thinks it won’t mean anything. It won’t be real. There’s more thunder as his chest tightens.

“It’s not about what you want,” she says. “Try again.” She places her hands at the small of his back and gives him a gentle push. It’s not enough to move him, merely enough to rock him like a branch in the wind, but he moves anyway.

Ronan approaches Adam, who stands preternaturally still and watches Ronan come toward him. Already it’s different. Adam is not recoiling. His face isn’t indignant. His shoulders aren’t tight. Ronan stops a few feet from him and spreads his arms out in surrender the way he does every time now.

“I think I love you,” he says. He flinches at the sound of his own voice and waits.

He used to say it differently. There have been a hundred different ways. He’s tried to be modest and charming and funny and mean and crass and defensive. He’s asked Adam questions and made declarations. He’s been on his knees more than once, begging. Adam has laughed in his face. Adam has yelled about how stupid Ronan must be. Adam has grabbed him roughly by his shoulders and wrists and throat to shake him. It’s as if his Adam, the one he cobbles together in his dreams, is made of all of the disdain and hate and cheaply glittering shallowness that the true Adam, the Adam he craves, has managed to work out of himself.

It occurs to Ronan that maybe this Adam is. Maybe Ronan is collecting all of the bits of Adam that the Adam he wants is sloughing away. He’s like a vindictive witch in a scary story, collecting the hair of his enemies to use against them. His Adam is the poison in the apple and he would gladly eat it every night if the true Adam would just be by his side as he’s dying in the morning.

Adam blinks like he’s just been flipped on. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay?” Ronan doesn’t have a script for this. He turns to look for the girl, but she’s gone.

“It’s okay,” Adam says.

A dull roar starts to build in Ronan’s ears. Adam is still talking but Ronan can’t hear him. He’s waking up, being pulled away. He looks around for something to hold on to, but there’s nothing there but Adam. He can’t hold on to Adam. Can’t risk it. Adam reaches out to him and he trips backward, falling.

And then he’s back in Adam’s room, shivering because the early spring night is seeping in through the thin walls and windows, spread out on his back as if he had fallen. His muscles ache. His heart aches and he can feel that tight pain radiate through him with every beat. His fingers are cramping because of how tightly they’re balled together. Adam’s cold, thin fingers are circled loosely around his wrist.

“Hey.” Adam shakes Ronan’s arm. He’s on his stomach, hanging off the edge of the mattress. “Are you okay?”

Ronan takes a deep breath. “Yeah,” he says, because if he says anything else he’ll regret it.

Adam nods, but doesn’t pull his hand away. In the real world Adam is the light figure, with his dusty hair and the sparse freckles on his chest and shoulders. His white sheet clings to him like a shroud, deflecting the night and hungrily eating at the 3AM darkness so that it doesn’t reach him. Ronan is all darkness, wrapped in a deep green sheet and his yearning. There’s something rolling off of Adam that Ronan feels is trying to eat him as well. It’s power, he thinks. It’s Cabeswater come to claim him. What he wouldn’t give to let it have him.

“Was I talking in my sleep?” he asks, deliberately placing one word after another.

“No,” Adam says. “Cabeswater was.” He taps at his cheek just below his deaf ear. “I woke up to voices who wanted me to wake you.”

 _Dream logic_ , Ronan thinks.  _Spiritual telephone_. Ronan wants to know what Cabeswater said, but whatever Adam tells him won’t be the whole truth. No one ever remembers every detail of their dreams. There’s always a piece missing, left behind. Ronan looks forward to going back to sleep and finding that piece to add to his contemptuous collection.

“What was happening? You’re not hurt are you?” He turns Ronan’s wrist over in his hand to look at it.

 _No_  would be a lie, because he is in pain, but he doesn’t see a truthful way out of this without demolishing the uneasy peace he’s built with himself. “We were talking,” he says. “You and I. About Cabeswater.” That’s close enough.

“You dream about me?” Adam says. There’s a soft note of incredulity at the end of it.

“Yes.”  

“Oh,” Adam says, in a breathy way that Ronan can only describe as careful. “I dream about you too.”

“You do?” Ronan says, and it’s his turn to be incredulous.

“Don’t all people dream about their friends?”

“Then why did you just ask me if I dreamt about you?”

“Because your dreams are special,” he says.

Ronan imagines himself sitting up and placing his hand against Adam’s cheek. Instead he merely says, “Yes.” He tries to put all of the the conviction of his possible touch behind the single syllable. He needs Adam to understand that he is special, worthy of a dream.

Adam turns Ronan’s wrist over again, studying it, before drawing it close to him and pressing his lips to Ronan’s knuckles. Ronan does sit up then, like a rusted metal trap slamming shut, and pulls his hand away. Adam raises his eyebrows and let’s Ronan go.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says.

“No,” Ronan whispers. He feels like he’s plummeting, like he never stopped falling. “Not like this Cabeswater. I told you, not like this.”

“I’m not Cabeswater,” Adam says, confusion flooding into his face. “I’m still just me. Cabeswater doesn’t own me.”

 _But it does_ , Ronan thinks.  _It owns all of us_. “In my dream,” he starts. He thinks better of it. “In my nightmare. They said they were fixing you, but you don’t need fixing. I don’t want what I want to change you just because the trees tie us together.”

“And what is it that you want?”

Ronan watches Adam slowly sit up. He keeps the sheets wrapped around his shoulders, reluctant, Ronan knows, to give up the body heat he’s built up there. Ronan doesn’t answer.

“What do you want, Ronan?” Adam says again, and the sound of his name in Adam’s mouth is maybe the holiest thing he’s ever heard.

Ronan is finding it hard to breathe suddenly. His heart speeds up to a tempo just shy of that of a hummingbird’s wings. “Go back to sleep,” he says, as if this were any other night or any other nightmare. “I didn’t mean–”

“I think maybe I do need fixing,” Adam cuts him off. “So much of me is broken. But this thing, this isn’t Cabeswater’s doing. This was always here. I want you to know that.” He slides from the mattress onto the floor. Adam reaches out and takes both of Ronan’s hands in his and kisses the knuckles there in turn. Then he kisses the inside of each of Ronan’s wrists. “Cabeswater didn’t make me a different person. It just helped me to see everything that was there. You don’t have to be afraid.”

As his little girl’s words come falling from Adam’s mouth Ronan knows what he means. He means that the forest’s power spilled into him like a light and illuminated all of his dark corners. Ronan knows this because that’s what happens to him in his dreams. Ronan isn’t sure he’s still not dreaming. He thinks there’s only one way to find out. He doesn’t want to do it. He’s still plummeting. He’s never wanted to do anything more in his life.

He pulls from Adam’s grasp again and holds his arms out in surrender the way he does every time now. “I think I love you,” he says. He flinches at the sound of his own voice and waits.

Adam does not laugh. Adam does not yell. Adam does grab him, but it’s gentle and warm and so very real when he pushes himself to his knees and wraps his arms and his sheet around Ronan’s shoulders. “I know,” he says. “God asshole, I know.”

Ronan is delirious, light headed. He does have a script for this, because he’s a glutton for punishment and he always wanted to be ready just in case, but he’ll be damned if he can remember it now. The only words running through his mind are, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“When I dream of you you tell me not to,” Adam murmurs. “When I dream of you all you want is to want. And I thought it would be okay if all I wanted was to be wanted.”

Adam, it seems to Ronan, has also been collecting small dead pieces of his friends. What a wonder magic is. What a dark and precious ability. “Is that all you want?”

“No,” Adam says. “I want everything.”

 _Selfish_ , Ronan thinks.  _Kind_ , Ronan thinks. He digs himself into Adam with his fingers and his arms and his jaw, anchoring himself to the forest he knows and the boy he’s learning.  _Try again_.


	27. Things you said through your teeth (Adam Parrish/Ronan Lynch)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted [here](http://charmingpplincardigans.tumblr.com/post/114817709724/ive-done-it-this-is-the-last-of), written for [allthroughoursplendor](http://allthroughoursplendor.tumblr.com/).

“I’m thinking here,” Gansey says, drawing a triangle onto the map he has spread out on the lunchroom table. **  
**

Adam looks around self-consciously. It will never stop being amazing to him how much of an invisibility cloak money can be. He very vividly remembers what happened to kids at his public middle school who were different. Right now the three of them can’t look more different if they try, with their heads together over a tumble of books as the rest of Aglionby relishes in their forty-five minutes of non-work time. A soccer ball flies over Gansey’s head and he doesn’t even flinch.

“Didn’t we check that last week,” Ronan says. He reaches over and pulls the pen out of Gansey’s hand.

“Yeah,” Gansey replies, “but the pulsing in the ley line is making things weird. It’s probably best to do some loops for the time being, see how things change.”

“And your hypothesis is?” Ronan puts the pen between his teeth and then gently places his fingers against Adam’s wrist, unbuttoning his shirt sleeve.

“What are you doing?” Adam asks.

“Nothing, Parrish,” Ronan says, rolling the sleeves of Adam’s sweater and button up shirt up to his elbow. Adam raises his arm a little and lets him do it. He shoots a confused look at Gansey who just shrugs and takes a bite of his salad.

“I don’t have a hypothesis,” Gansey says. “This is purely exploratory.” He calmly leans over and pulls another pen from his bag to continue making notes on the map.

Ronan is using Gansey’s first pen to draw twisting dark lines halfway up Adam’s forearm. Adam watches for a moment. He looks up at Ronan’s face, which is intent on his work, eyes narrowed and lips pursed. Then he looks around them again, sure that this will be the last straw. No one is even paying attention.  

Adam feels like he should pull his arm away, because Ronan is sometimes weird, but this takes the actual cake. On the other hand, Ronan is rarely this focused on anything during the school day and it seems a shame to shake him out of it. Adam’s skin is tingling where Ronan touches him and he tells himself that it’s the ink. His mother had always warned him against writing on his hands, lest the ink seep in and poison him. Ronan probably wouldn’t poison him, he figures. Not on purpose anyway.

When the bell rings at the end of the period the lower half of Adam’s forearm looks like a tangled mess. Ronan brings Adam’s arm up to his lips and blows on his artwork lightly, drying the ink. Adam shivers as the breath tickles across his skin. He gets stuck staring at the way Ronan’s eyelashes are nearly resting on the apples of his cheeks and doesn’t have enough wherewithal to look away when Ronan makes eye contact.

“It’s not done,” Ronan says. “So don’t fuck it up.” Then he lets Adam’s arm go.

“Okay,” Adam says. He carefully rolls his sleeves back down and tries not to press against it too hard in his next class.

…

In Economics he and Ronan sit side by side. They make it through a full fifteen minutes of the lecture before Ronan reaches across the narrow aisle between them and tugs at Adam’s wrist.

Adam yanks his arm away and looks pointedly from Ronan to their teacher. Ronan rolls his eyes. “I’m taking notes with this hand,” Adam hisses.

“You don’t need notes for this shit,” Ronan whispers. “Capitalism good. Poor people bad.” He tugs at Adam’s sweater sleeve and the teacher pauses in his lecture and levels them with a look. Ronan collects himself back in his own desk and waits for the lecture to continue.

Adam lets out a loose sigh of relief which turns out to be premature, because as soon as their teacher turns around to the board to draw out the graphs for supply and demand Ronan is back to tugging on his elbow. “Oh, fucking fine,” Adam whispers, and hangs his arm off the corner of his desk.

Ronan quickly rolls up Adam’s sleeves again and gets back to work. The tip of the pen drags across Adam’s skin with a pleasantly pointed pressure, leaving small trenches of ink in its wake. He feels that this should probably annoy him much more than it does. It’s incredibly easy for him to be annoyed with Ronan. That’s basically his default state these days. But there’s something about the way Ronan’s face goes uncharacteristically soft as he’s working at his doodles that makes Adam reluctant to speak up and be the rock that disturbs that tranquil pond.

Really, he doesn’t know why he’s never considered Ronan to be artistic before. Sure, dreaming isn’t exactly a classical art, but it requires imagination and control that Adam is sure he doesn’t have. And then there’s the tattoo, the design for which must have come from somewhere. Even if Ronan had dreamt it instead of drawn it, it’s still impressively intricate and had needed a delicate and balanced eye to create.

Adam is paying attention to the lecture, or trying to, so it’s him the teacher makes eye contact with when he turns back around and bestows them with a disappointing glare.

“Mr. Lynch,” he says. “Could you please vandalize Mr. Parrish on your own time?”

Every boy in the room turns to look at them. Adam wishes suddenly that the floor would open up and swallow him whole. Nothing happens.  _What is the point of giving yourself to a magical forest_ , he thinks,  _if it’s not just going to absorb you on command?_

Ronan doesn’t look up. “I’m almost done,” he says. “You can continue.”

“That’s kind of you, Mr. Lynch,” the teacher says, voice pitched to indicate that it’s anything but. “But I’m afraid I must insist on the attention of every student in my class. Attention, I might note, that is currently being held by you. 2D art is two buildings over, if you feel that will be a class more suited to your gifts.”

Adam looks down at his arm. It’s completely covered in thin, root-like lines. Near the inside of his elbow there’s a tangle of them surrounding something else in blue ink that stands out against the mass of black. Adam doesn’t even know when Ronan changed pens. The lines appear to pulse as the muscles in his arm twitch nervously. It takes more will than Adam will ever admit to not get lost in the shading of them the way he sometimes finds himself lost in thought while staring at Ronan’s tattoo.

Ronan lets go of Adam’s arm and settles back across the aisle and into this desk, capping the blue pen and smiling up at their teacher. “That won’t be necessary,” he says. “I think I’m done for the day.”

The teacher looks between them. The other boys are still looking at them. Adam can feel his ears and cheeks going red and jesus, does he hate Ronan Lynch. Eventually everyone turns back to the board. Ronan leans over and drops the blue pen onto Adam’s desk and Adam realizes it’s one that had been in his bag. He narrows his eyes at Ronan in frustration. Ronan raises an eyebrow in return and mimics blowing on his own forearm. Adam sighs and attempts to dry the ink a bit before the bell rings and he has to roll his sleeves back down again.

…

Adam is safely cradled in the noise and leather of the back of the Pig before he hazards looking at his arm again. He pulls his sweater off entirely and rolls up his shirt sleeve, relieved when there isn’t a whole bunch of ink staining it. What Ronan has mapped onto his arm looks like a complete root system, but not any sort he’s familiar with. Definitely not trees. The lines are too spindly and matted near his wrist. Grass maybe? The blue ink draws his attention. He stares into it for several moments before he realizes what it is.

There, up near ditch of his elbow, Ronan has drawn a decently anatomically correct heart being swaddled by the root tips. Or more likely, Adam thinks, the roots are eating away it, drawing energy from its blood and its steady pulse. He looks up and meets Ronan’s eyes in the rear view mirror. Ronan looks away.

Gansey pulls into a gas station and stops at one of the pumps. “Do you guys want anything from inside?”

“Peanuts,” Ronan says. “And a Coke.”

“Adam?” Gansey turns around in his seat as he asks and notices Adam’s arm. He purses his lips thoughtfully, but doesn’t say anything.

“No, I’m good,” Adam says.

“A Coke it is then,” Gansey replies, and gets out before Adam can protest. Adam and Ronan sit in silence while Gansey pumps the gas.

Once Gansey has disappeared inside the convenience store Adam says, “Are they holding it or feeding off it?”

“Why does it have to be one or the other?”

It doesn’t, Adam knows. His thing with Cabeswater is a strange and powerful sort of symbiosis that feeds him as much as it drains him. Adam looks from his arm to the rear view mirror, where he can only see part of Ronan’s profile reflected back at him, to the back of Ronan’s head. “I guess it doesn’t,” he says. “They’re not tree roots, though.”

“No,” Ronan says. “They’re not.”

“So it’s not the forest. What are they?”

Ronan meets Adam’s eyes finally in the rear view mirror. “Brambles,” he says.

From where Adam is sitting he can see the black, thorny vines peeking out from the edges of the straps on Ronan’s muscle tee where his shoulder is straying past the back of the passenger seat. Beyond that he can see the reflection of Ronan’s face: the curious set of his mouth, the worried dip in his brow, the way his eyes are fiercely and incongruously looking out from beneath that as if challenging him.

It is not in Adam Parrish’s nature to back down from a challenge. Especially not one issued by Ronan Lynch. Then again, it’s also not in his nature to have let Ronan so carefully use him as a canvas to the detriment of his coveted invisibility. Almost as much as it’s not in Ronan’s nature to have spent so much of the day looking so unguarded and at ease in his work. Adam decides that, just for the day, he will accept a gift from one of his friends without argument.

“Thank you,” he says.

It’s not what Ronan is expecting to hear. Adam watches the confusion work itself across his face, chased quickly by his usual look of haughty disdain. “Well, you know,” he says. “Figured you could use some ink. Make you look cool for once in your life.”

Gansey opens the driver’s side door then. He hands in the small plastic bag of sodas and snacks to Ronan before climbing in and starting the car. Adam is once again buffered by vibration and sound and Ronan is once again flipping idly through the radio stations as if nothing is different, as if the two of them are still set as far apart as they had been that morning.   

Adam looks at the heart on his arm and wonders if it’s supposed to be Ronan’s or his own, or if it really matters. They’re all of them tangled together so inseparably. He wonders if this is what family is supposed to feel like. The confusion and strangeness of what they have being just something that augments the rest of it. He accepts the soda he didn’t ask for, catching Ronan’s thumb under his own on the hand over. Ronan is still not looking at him, but he can swear that in the reflection of the rear view mirror he catches the corner of a smile.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [All The Things You Might Have Said (The Barns Dance Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4178862) by [Evil_Little_Dog](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evil_Little_Dog/pseuds/Evil_Little_Dog)
  * [the things you said when you were scared (the face your fears remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4233702) by [pocky_slash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocky_slash/pseuds/pocky_slash)




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